As already mentioned in this post, we presented Vispol at the booth of the state of Hessen/Germany at the fair “Moderner Staat” in Berlin on 24. and 25. November 2009. Vispol has been shown on the round multi-touch and TUI table from Sensory Minds.

Here are a few photos from the fair. Please apologize the poor quality of the photos as my camera did not see the sense in making proper use of its auto-focus functionality.

I love those nail tattoos of this young Vispol user:

My software Vispol will be shown at the booth of the state of Hessen/Germany at the fair “Moderner Staat” in Berlin on 24. and 25. November 2009.

It will be shown on the new really cool round [!] multi-touch and TUI table from sensory minds.

I will be there on both days.

I helped Sensory Minds to build an interactive multi-touch and tangible media installation for a Werkschau of students from the Hochschule Pforzheim. Graduates are represented by objects that are provided with a fiducial on the underside and a picture of the work on the upper side. As soon as the object is added to the table, pictures of the student’s projects will be loaded and circularly arranged around the object. Those pictures can be browsed via multi-touch. If a user taps on a project picture all pictures to this project will be loaded and will be arranged on a second circle around the project images.

Behind the scenes there is a django backend application that stores and loads information about student’s and their projects from a MySQL database. The frontend is written in Flash and loads its objects from the server via the django application.

The multi-touch and fiducial tracking engine is a combination of the Touchlib and reacTIVision.

My part in this work has been the frontend animation and backend data retrieval in Flash and the Python-based django backend application. Additionally, the connection of the reacTIVision based fiducials to the Flash frontend via TUIO has been established by me.

As the Touchlib and reacTIVision have been used parallely I have built a piece of software in Java that is based on Flosc that integrates TUIO messages of multiple TUIO producers into one TUIO message. This piece of software also allows to use multiple cameras in one multi-touch setup.

This multi-touch visualization should be different from the common multi-touch use cases scaling/rotating images and zooming in maps. Additionally, this visualization should have a dedicated use and should not just be a prototype that demoes basic multi-touch capabilities.

Vispol

I have been intrigued by the interactive visualizations in Minority Report, which provided natural user interaction for profiling activities of a policeman in future.

Minority Report is (still) science fiction and I doubt that the kind of gestural interaction like it is being performed in this movie is really usable. However, the idea of a visual tool for the police that helps to analyze critical situations like murders or special situations like bank hold-ups or hostage takings is fascinating.

By chance I have had the oportunity to meet an executive of the police of the state of Hessen, who collaborates with the visualization professor Prof. Dr. Ralf Doerner at the RheinMain University of Applied Sciences. This police executive is responsible for the coordination of special situations like the introduced cases bank hold-ups or hostage takings.

In such situations a police crew will gather in a room in the police facilities that is fitted with special equipment. This crew coordinates the activities of the local police on-site of the special situation. The police makes use of quite a lot of specialized software to collect available information throughout a special situation in a central database. However, the police of Hessen has not been been using a dedicated application for the visualization of information about involved persons. Instead they have utilized a whiteboard, which is crammed with information after five persons have been added:

Before Vispol: Whiteboard scenario visualization

To solve these problems we developed a software called Vispol (Visualization for the police): It provides the possibility to collect information about involved persons and objects of a special situation in a visual manner.

Vispol visualizes dangers of a special situation to the police officers and enables a quick introduction of a special situation to persons that are new to the situation.

In Vispol a person is represented by a circle and an object is represented by a square. Persons can be connected with other persons and objects and vice versa. A person consists out of a central circle and ten wedges around this circle. The central circle contains information about the type of person (culprit, victim, not involved), the sex and the name of the person. The upper five wedges can hold information represented by an icon about the age, the health state, the armature, a potential criminal file and the whereabout of the person. The lower five wedges can hold various information like notes, questions or photos of the person:

Vispol person element

An object can have a name, a whereabout and a color.

A connection between two persons can have up to four attributes: an emotional relationship, a related relationship, a crisis in the relationship and/or a business relationship. Connections between persons and objects and objects and objects cannot have attributes.

Example for persons, objects and connections in Vispol

Additionally, it is possible to apply layout algorithms to a Vispol visualization that help to analyze the situation. Currently, there are three layout algorithms:

1. A circle layout arranges persons and objects in a circular fashion.
2. A whereabout layout orders persons and objects according to their whereabout.
3. A type layout sorts persons and objects according to their type (culprit, victim, uninvolved, object)
4. A move to center layout moves a person in the center and arranges the persons and objects that are connected immediately to the person around the person.
5. A highlight weapon layout shrinks persons that do not carry a weapon.

An example for the circle layout (1.):

Vispol circle layout

An example for the whereabout layout (2.):

Vispol whereabout layout

An example for the type layout (3.):

Vispol type layout

An example for the move to center layout (4.):

Vispol center layout

An example for the highlight weapons layout (5.):

Vispol highlight weapons

Vispol is written by me in Adobe Flash Actionscript 3 and Flex. It makes use of the excellent data visualization framework flare from Jeffrey Heer for Actionscript 3.

The fabulous design has been conceived by Melanie Seyer. With her I accomplished the digital volvelles project earlier on. Many icons have been dictated by the police as they had their own symbols for many purposes. Thank you very much, Mel!

The police would like to use use this visualization in their special situations facilities via a projector to model and to discuss situations:

Situation room

Vispol projection in situation room

In terms of my thesis Vispol is completely usable via multi-touch.
⇾ Additional information about the multi-touch functionality of Vispol.

In another Bachelor’s thesis Vispol a tangible user interface for Vispol has been complemented by Frederic Frieß.
⇾ Additional information about the tangible user interface functionality of Vispol.

You will find videos of Vispol’s multi-touch functionality here and of its tangible user interface functionality here.

Finally: Play around with the mouse version of Vispol.

This is a small version of the poster with which we will present features of the Virttable at iTec ’08:

Multi-touch table The Virttable poster

Many thanks to Melanie Seyer, who designed the poster for me!

Update: Two photographs from our booth at the iTEC:

Virttable booth at iTEC '08

Johannes Luderschmidt and the Virttable booth at iTEC '08

TimeTube article

Feel free to download the article TimeTube – Assist Scientists to Enhance Laboratory Scheduling in PDF format.

In another part Benjamin presents images and videos of portfolio projects that he has done so far. Those images and videos can be browsed easily with a paging navigation:

To be able to add and modify jobs, images and videos Benjamin wanted a backend in which he could easily upload pictures and videos of portfolio projects he has done so far. Thus, I have created a mini Portfolio CMS (written in PHP, using a MySQL database) in which Benjamin can edit his projects, can apply them to categories (e.g. advertising, editorial/print, illustration) and can finally upload images and videos with short descriptions:

Update: As benjamin-bartels.com has been intended to be used for his application tour Benjamin took most of the content offline after he has found himself a nice job. However, in this (very, very nice) gringografico job you can at least see how jobs have been intended to be used.