Cross-media linking and tagging support for learning groups

Abstract

Typical tasks of learning groups and knowledge workers include working both with printed and digital documents. We present a pen-based and tangible interaction concept for the linking and tagging of documents in a mixed physical and digital environment.

The interaction with printed and electronic documents is unified. We therefore use electronic pens, which equally capture physical handwriting on real paper and act as an input device on a specific screen prototype. Links and tags can have variable scopes ranging from small document passages to a collection of several documents. Physical folders along with camera-based marker tracking provide for the tangible definition of document collections. Tags are intuitively defined on a paper tag menu card. We present two visualizations of links and tags (a document-centered viewer and a hyperstructure-centered graph view). These are closely coupled with the physical environment.