Abstract:

The Personal Digital Historian (PDH) is an ongoing research project aimed at allowing groups of people to casually browse, embellish, and explore large collections of their personal data, such as pictures, video, or more business-related items such as spreadsheets or PowerPoint slides. Our initial prototype system is designed for a tabletop display and to be used while people are talking to each other. In this paper, we focus exclusively on describing those aspects of our project which provide a visual interface to support exploration of a database of personal data. The interface allows people to organize their images along the four questions essential to storytelling: who?, when?, where?, and what? Users are provided with a wide variety of flexible interaction methods, including region of interest query specification with in-place freeform stroke input, image-based book marking, suggestion generation via automatic query relaxation, and output summarization. With this interface, the users can enjoy their conversation while having the photos at their finger tips, rather than being distracted by the effort of formulating queries.