Virginia Tech is the largest and most diverse university in Virginia. With a student body of nearly 25,000 in Blacksburg and numerous other sites across the Commonwealth of Virginia, it is the premier land-grant university in the state, with responsibilities for teaching, research, and service activities. Virginia Tech has the largest personal computer/workstation population of any American university, and has internationally reputed programs in human-computer interaction, human factors, and information access. The University and surrounding community are highly networked through the Blacksburg Electronic Village.

The overarching goal of our Research Infrastructure project is to focus on removing barriers to the accessibility of interactive computing. Specifically, we have created a technological infrastructure to support our research in addressing the causes of usability barriers to computing. Our infrastructure consists of laboratories for research in usability methods, interaction technology, teleconferencing, and information access and visualization, as well as faculty and students skilled in these types of research. This is the fourth year of our five year award.

1. Past Year's Activities and Accomplishments

Goals, objectives, and targeted activities for the past year.
Our major goal for this year was to complete the physical implementation of our infrastructure (e.g., lighting, windows, networking connections), in particular in the Usability Methods Research Lab and the Teleconferencing Lab. Both these labs are now fully furbished and in active use for research and for instruction. A number of research projects, both on-going and newly initiated, are underway in these two labs and the other infrastructure facilities. A research goal was to begin using the Usability Methods Research Lab to develop new usability evaluation methods, and to begin using the facilities to support usability evaluation activities. For this reason the laboratories have been designed with tripled observation rooms for meta-observation. The Teleconferencing Lab has increased interest in collaborative work research issues and was used in the new CS CSCW course. The major upgrades to our networking infrastructure to support these facilities is proceeding in collaboration with the University and is targeted for this spring. We began to achieve our goal of actively leveraging our infrastructure for outreach across campus for other timely, emerging research topics such as virtual environments. To this end, the University's Center for Human-Computer interaction directed by Dr. Jack Carroll is now in its second year of operation.

Teleconferencing laboratory showing dual lighting system and
1-way mirror between lab and center observation room.

In outreach, we have had extensive involvement with several organizations in the United States government. We have presented, for the past two years, at a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Symposium on Usability Engineering, and have collaborated with the Social Security Administration (SSA) to improve their interactive system development process. The SSA group received a government award as a result of their work with us. We are also being funded to perform an independent user-based evaluation of a major project for the Marine Corps, called Sea Dragon, that will be deployed to the fleet in the next biennium.

Finally, we have hosted several visits by outside organizations to our new facilities, including Siemens Manufacturing, Social Security Administration, and AT&T. Microsoft is planning a visit in the near future.

Components and materials required (Input).
This year award expenditures are projected at roughly $350,000. Added to that is university cost sharing of roughly $40,000 for salaries, a new HCI faculty position, and support through projects spawned by the project. These include grants from NSF (7 grants, $3,634K), D of Ed (1 grant, $559K), IBM (2 grants, $411K), FIPSE (2 grants, $486K), SURA (1 grant, $90K), and NRL (2 grants, 149K).

Indications of success (Output).
Numbers of students supported: 26; Publications ca. 50 per year.

Specific projects or programs using the infrastructure:

• virtual environments research, development, and evaluation
• presence and disorientation in virtual environments
• remote usability methods development and evaluation
• video conferencing for distance learning and collaborative work
• digital libraries
• educational technologies
• WWW-based research and development
• data exploration and visualization

• Metric of presence in VE, based on magnitude estimation ethnographic metrics of video conferencing interface usability for collaborative work
• IDEAL, a tool to support design and evaluation of the user interaction component of an interactive system
• Remote evaluation technique, for evaluation of an interaction design by users at locations different from evaluators
• WWW-based tool, to support classification of usability problems found during evaluation

• Supported thesis research for one female with a visual disability.

Degree of success.
This project has achieved its goals this year and, in fact, has surpassed its objectives thus far in the life of the project. In the Usability Methods Research Laboratory, we set up a stable version of IDEAL in a permanent installation, along with two-way windows and user observation rooms. We installed peripheral video-cameras, microphones, audio mixers, tape decks, and video editing equipment to support several projects related to usability evaluation and development of new methods. A new version of a usability problem classification method is also being developed in the Usability Methods Research Lab. Further, our work in remote usability evaluation is progressing with observation of subjects in isolated rooms, reviewing and editing tapes, analyzing data, and evolving the remote evaluation method - exactly the types of activities this lab is designed to support! This laboratory has exceeded our expectations over what we envisioned when we wrote our proposal. The equipment, set-up, and space provide a very exciting environment for the many projects underway.

The Project Envision digital library has progressed further this year, and its unique user interface is being used as the basis for ground-breaking research in psychophysical issues in user interaction design. An empirical investigation of icon size, shape, and color is underway to determine effects of each of these encoding mechanisms on user task performance.

Our work has strongly moved, during the past year, into virtual environments (VEs). Through separate NSF funding, Virginia Tech is building a CAVE with eye trackers, and several projects from across campus are already planned for the CAVE, which will be functional in June. We have also acquired spatialized sound and haptic feedback equipment. Other VE work focused on a user-based comparative evaluation of a new interaction technique, called pre-screen projection, in which the screen display moves in response to a user's head movements. We are also completing a taxonomy of usability characteristics in VEs and will, as mentioned earlier, be evaluating the Marine Corps' Sea Dragon project user interface.

In addition to the CAVE and the Sea Dragon project, other new projects are being inspired and leveraged by our new infrastructure. For example, there are now two major research projects in educational technologies, one dealing with collaborative technologies in the domain of the physical sciences, and the other a long term assessment of achievement in a 5th-grade classroom in which the students have immersive exposure to a networking technologies-supported curriculum. The project equipment has directly supported these efforts, and later this spring we expect to begin using the Teleconferencing Laboratory to do non-invasive remote observation of our 5th-grade classroom in a school some 15 miles away.

Unmet goals (if any).
In our original proposal, we expected to create an Interaction Technology Laboratory to house a wide variety of state-of-the-art hardware and software. We had envisioned it as a specific single site, but in reality it exists as a distributed facility. We used opportunistic planning to refocus and reallocate resources from an Interaction Technology Lab to the Teleconferencing Lab as we realized how important the Teleconferencing Lab would be to our long-range plans, projects, and teaching. So while there is no single facility with an Interaction Technology Laboratory sign on the door, we do, in fact, have many different sites that collectively form this laboratory, with virtual environment equipment, teleconferencing facilities, video resources, storage devices, and a broad spectrum of innovative input/output devices.

Outcome.
This project has provided a mechanism for great cohesion and focused research among many faculty members in Computer Science and Industrial & Systems Engineering. Researchers in software engineering, modeling and simulation, Web-based applications, and many other areas are finding unique and rewarding opportunities through this new infrastructure and collaboration with each other. Researchers across the University are gaining a greater awareness of the importance of the user interface in interactive systems. The products of our research - new methods for ensuring usability, educational technology advances, virtual environment research and development, and digital libraries contributions - are, indeed, breaking barriers for users to the power of computing.

3. Publications

Most significant publications.

Begole, J.A., Struble, C.A., and Isenhour, P. (in press). Toward Collaboration Transparency in Java. IEEE Internet Computing.

Chin, G. (March 1997). Participatory Analysis: Shared Development of Requirements from Scenarios. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA, pp. 162-169.

Ehrich, R.W. and Kavanaugh A.L. (1997). Managing the Evolution of a Virtual School. In Cohill, A.M. and Kavanaugh, A.L., Eds., Community Networks: Lessons from Blacksburg, Virginia. Reading MA: Artech House.

Hartson, H.R., Castillo J.C., Kelso J., Kamler J., and W.C. Neale. April 1996. Remote Evaluation: The Network as an Extension of the Usability Laboratory. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York, pp. 228-235.

Kies, J.K., R.C. Williges, and B.H. Williges (in press). Desktop Video Conferencing: A Systems Approach. In M. Helander, Landauer, T.K. and Prabhu, P. Eds., Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (2nd Edition). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.

Kies, J.K., R.C. Williges, M.B. Rosson (in press). Evaluating Desktop Video Conferencing for Distance Learning. Computers and Education.

Kies, J.K., Williges, R.C., and Rosson M.B. (in press). Studying Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Review of Research Issues and Strategies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science.

Liu, X. and R.W. Ehrich (December 1996). Analysis of Moire Patterns in Non-Uniformly Sampled Halftones. Proc. 3rd IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision, Sarasota FL, pp. 208-213.

Nowell, L.T., France, R.K., Hix, D., Heath, L.S., and Fox, E.A. (August 1996). Visualizing Search Results: Some Alternatives to Query-Document Similarity. Proc. SIGIR'96, Zurich, Switzerland.

Nowell, L.T., France, R.K., and Hix, D. (March 1997). Exploring Search Results with Envision. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA, pp. 14-15.

Ribler, R., Mathur, A., and Abrams, M. (January 1996). Visualizing and Modeling Categorical Time Series Data. Proc. Symposium on Visualizing Time-varying Data, Williamsburg, VA, pp. 3-19.

Shaffer, C.A., Heath, L.S., and Yang, Y. (June 1996). SWAN: A Student-Controllable Data Structure Visualization System. Proc Ed-MEDIA 96, Boston MA, pp. 632-637.

Snow, M.P., J.K. Kies, D.C. Neale, and R.C. Williges (1996). A Case Study in Participatory Design. Ergonomics in Design 4(2), pp. 18-24.

Tinoco, L.C., Fox, E.A., Ehrich, R.W., and Fuks, H. (November 1996). QUIZIT: An Interactive Quiz System for WWW-based Instruction. Proc. VII Brazilian Symposium on Educational Technology, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Fox, E., Eaton, J., McMillan, G., Kipp, N., Wiess, L., Arce, E., and Guyer, S. (September 1996). National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Unlock University Resources. The Magazine of Digital Library Research.

4. Students Supported by Award

MS Degrees in Progress

Jose Castillo, Cara Cocking, Joey Gabbard, Win Heagy, Philip Isenhour, Tommy Johnson, Faith McCreary, Michael McGee, Vonda Patterson (minority), Brandon Satanek, Linda van Rens

PhD Degrees in Progress

Gahleb Abdulla, Brian Amento, James (Bo) Begole, George Chin, Hope Harley (minority), Dennis Neale, Lucy Nowell, Ray Reaux, Joe Reiss, Cheryl Seals (minority)

Degrees Completed

Lucio Tinoco -- MS completed December 1996, "Online Evaluation in WWW-based Courseware: The QUIZIT System"

Susan Keenan -- PhD completed August 1996, "Product Usability and Process Improvement Based on Usability Problem Classification"

Jonathan Kies -- PhD completed March 1997, "Empirical Methods for Evaluating Video- Mediated Collaborative Work"

Randy L. Ribler -- PhD completed April 1997, "Visualizing Categorical Time Series Data with Applications to Computer and Communications Network Traces"

Michael Snow -- PhD completed December 1996, "Charting Presence in Virtual Environments and Its Effects on Performance"