Stanford's iRoom provides an exciting testbed for HCI research. Our group is exploring a range of projects related to new interaction metaphors and techniques, computer-supported cooperative work, and technologies that move away from traditional desktop computing.
Interacting with large displays is one focus of our research. The FlowMenu is one interaction style we have explored, and it is the technique used in our PostBrainstorm application. PostBrainstorm is designed to take advantage of the unique properties of large, high-resolution displays, and it runs on our "Mural" (The Mural uses a 3 by 4 array of tiled projectors to create a 9 Megapixel, 64 dpi, whiteboard-sized display). The use of gesture to interact with large displays was explored as part of the Barehands project.
The Virtual Auditorium explores the use of an environment with cameras and large displays to enable an effective distance-learning videoconferencing system. This work has led to interesting discoveries about the perception of eye-contact and what makes for "convincing" videoconferencing images.
Our bottom-projected tabletop display poses several interesting challenges: What devices are best suited for interacting with the table? What advantages and disadvantages come from having a display that is viewed from several orientations simultaneously? What new interaction metaphors can leverage the table's affordances? Karen Grant is exploring the use of the iRoom's table as part of her thesis work.
Observing how real users can take advantage of the iRoom environment is another important aspect of our group's efforts. For example, we are interested in how the infrastructure can be used to enhance the productivity of groups in meetings, or to improve the educational experience of students. We are excited about our collaborations with other departments, such as the Civil Engineering Department (whose CIFE project utilizes our smartboards, table display, and the Event Heap infrastructure) and the Department of Radiology (who use our large displays for exciting new visualizations of medical data). The Stanford Learning Lab is using an iRoom environment to investigate ways of increasing the productivity of student design teams.
The iSpaces project involves several HCI components as well. The Persistence project explores the role of visual and historical contextual information in improving the performance of groups working on projects. The iStuff project is developing a toolkit of small, wireless, platform-independent, web-programmable input and output devices which can be used for the rapid prototyping of physical "post-desktop" user interfaces.