Liquid Text (October 1, 2009 - September 30, 2010)

Keith Edwards

Georgia Tech PI: Keith Edwards
Students: Craig Tashman, Joe Zhou, Hrishikesh Pathak
Samsung Technical POC: Insik Myung

Project Goals

The goal of this project is to develop new interaction techniques to support active reading, a common aspect of knowledge work that involves reading, sensemaking, annotating, and interlinking textual content. Specifically, this project aims to develop new interface metaphors for interacting with documents and text on multitouch systems, create and evaluate an interaction vocabulary to support browsing, annotation, comparison, hyperlinking, organization, and other aspects of active reading, and provide a compelling and novel applications of multitouch technology that can support the needs of knowledge workers in advanced office environments.

Project Details

LiquidText running on a multitouch-enabled computer


Figure 1: LiquidText running on a multitouch-enabled computer


Accomplishments


Our major accomplishments in this first project year are as follows:

Freeform virtual ink drawn on a document


Figure 2: Freeform virtual ink drawn on a document where the document is uncollapsed (left), and where part of the document is collapsed (right).


Goals for Project Year 2


We have a detailed project plan for Year 2 of this effort, which we expect will result in a greatly refined version of LiquidText, targeted for use on small (10”) tablet devices. Through the extensive evaluation, validation, and ideation process completed in Year 1, we have completed initial designs for the features enumerated above. In Year 2, we intend to implement these features and perform a final, summative evaluation of the software. We expect this project year to result in a large number of new interaction techniques as well as a solid, deployable version of the system. We hope to begin project Year 2 in January, 2011.

Research Artifacts