This nature encyclopedia application developed in the Global Information Systems (GlobIS)
research group at ETH Zurich deals with a children's nature encyclopedia published in book form by
Dorling Kindersley. In addition to the book, there also exists a software application delivered
on a CD-ROM which covers the same topics as the book version of the encyclopedia. Discussions
with the publisher and examination of the material revealed that both the book and the CD-ROM
were not only marketed as independent products, but also designed and developed by separate
departments with little or no cooperation and as a result contained quite different content.
The goal of the Nature Encyclopedia application was to take the existing physical and digital
content and create a new integrated version of the encyclopedia making use of interactive paper
by linking parts of the book to pieces of digital information from the CD-ROM.
Fig. 1: Nature Encyclopedia application on laptop
A very simple and controlled setup was chosen for initial user studies. Only
paper-to-digital links were available and, after a link to the digital media had been activated,
there was no possibility to follow further links in the digital media. These restrictions were enforced
to prevent users from switching completely from the physical to digital media, thereby abandoning the book
version of the encyclopedia.
Fig. 2: Nature Encyclopedia application on Pocket PC
A more technical goal for the nature encyclopedia application was to have the application running on different
output devices. As described earlier, iServer uses the eXtensible Information Management Architecture (XIMA) to
deploy information on different output channels. Based on XIMA, two different user interfaces, one for desktop
computers and a second one for handheld computers (iPAQ 3660 Pocket Computer) with limited screen size, were
designed for the Nature Encyclopedia application. It was easily possible to run the Java code of the iPaper
client application on a limited Java virtual machine installed on the Pocket Computer. The communication of the
Java application running on the iPAQ with the pen input device was a bit more difficult since special drivers for the
serial port communication had to be installed.
Three different versions of the encyclopedia—book only, a book together with CD-ROM and the integrated
interactive paper version—were compared in a user study where groups of children were given specific
tasks to solve using only one of the three versions.
A first outcome of these initial user studies was the insight that the system lacked some form of
feedback after the processing of a pen position had been initiated. It could take up to two seconds
to process the pen data, send a request to the remote server, look up the linked information and transform
it to the appropriate output format before sending it back to the client device. Since users were not aware
that the system was already processing a request, in many cases they repeated the selection activity—either
of the same or another object—and this could lead to confusing feedback. Based on these observations, an
acoustic feedback component was added to the interactive paper framework. When a new position is detected
by the pen, the client device immediately plays a sound and, at the same time, sends the request to
the server. With this simple acoustic feedback, users become aware that their selection has been
detected and is currently being processed by the server.
Another result of the user studies was that the screen-based user interface is too restrictive in
not allowing users to interact with activated link targets. The users reported that for movies
and sounds some kind of paper- or screen-based controls, e.g. replay or volume control
functionality, should be provided to allow direct interaction with the played resource.
Further, users wanted to have a possibility to navigate in the digital media similar to the
Web or other multimedia interfaces. The HTML page resulting from a specific pen interaction
should contain links to further related material as indicated in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3: Content types
As mentioned earlier, the screen-based interface was deliberately implemented without any
controls and links for further navigation in the digital media, based on the requirements of
our project partners who were in charge of the user studies. However, the underlying
information model for the Nature Encyclopedia was designed with many associations between
different information entities and restrictions were introduced on the interface layer only.
By implementing a domain-specific nature database, we could not only link to simple media files,
but also integrate semantically rich database objects. These objects could store metadata
about simple media files and, through associations to other information objects, could
support deeper levels of linking. The resulting schema of the nature database is presented
in Figure 4.
Fig. 4: Nature database schema
To show the advantage of using a domain-specific application database, let us assume that we want to
link the image of the antelope situated in the lower left part of the booklet to a digital image of
an antelope. Instead of mapping directly to the antelope.jpg file, we map to an instance of objects
of type species that defines information such as the species name, average size, description
and habitat. Not only can we display all, or some subset of, this information in addition to
the image, but also links to associated information objects such as predator species or a
species habitat. In other words, we can generate fully hyperlinked web documents directly from
the database content. It is important to note that with this general solution, we can support all
forms of linking between active areas and digital resources—whether these are simple media
files or hypermedia documents as discussed in this example.
Using Paper to Support Collaboration in Educational Activities,
Ella Tallyn, David M. Frohlich, Nadja Linketscher, Beat Signer and Guy Adams,
Proceedings of CSCL 2005, Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning,
Taipei, Taiwan, May 2005 (acceptance rate: 30%)
