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Toward tangibles and display-rich interfaces for co-located and distributed genomics collaborations

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Abstract

We discuss and present design probes investigating how pervasive displays could offer unique opportunities for enhancing discovery and learning with “big data.” Our collaboration across three universities undertook a series of design exercises investigating approaches for collaborative, interactive, tangibles, and multitouch-engaged visualizations of genomic and related scientific datasets. These exercises led to several envisionments of tangible interfaces that employ active tokens and interactive surfaces to facilitate co-located and distributed engagement with large datasets. We describe some of the motivation and background for these envisioned interfaces; consider key aspects linking and distinguishing the designs; and relate these to the present and near-future state of the art for tangible and multitouch engagement with pervasive displays toward collaborative science.

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Notes

  1. This manuscript draws in significant part from a same-authored ACM Pervasive Displays 2019 conference proceedings

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Acknowledgments

We thank David Merrill, Liam Staskawicz, Consuelo Valdes, Casey Grote, André Wiggins, and Michael Lynn for supporting this work.

Funding

We are appreciative of NSF grants CNS-1828611, CNS-1126739, IIS-1149530, and IIS-1320350; the NSERC Discovery Grant and Canada Research Chairs programs, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) Innovation Fund for partial support of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Genetics & Biochemistry, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Miriam K. Konkel

  2. Human-Centered Computing Division, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Brygg Ullmer

  3. Dept. of Computer Science, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA

    Orit Shaer

  4. Synaesthetic Media Lab, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Ali Mazalek

  5. Dept. of Computer Science, Drury University, Springfield, MO, USA

    Chris Branton

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Konkel, M.K., Ullmer, B., Shaer, O. et al. Toward tangibles and display-rich interfaces for co-located and distributed genomics collaborations. Pers Ubiquit Comput 26, 767–779 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01376-5

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