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M. Baldauf:
"Advanced Interaction and Visualization Concepts for Mobile Urban Exploration";
Supervisor, Reviewer: T. Grechenig, P. Reichl; 183/1, 2011; oral examination: 2011-01-31.

Urban environments have evolved to rich digital information spaces over the last few
years: they are virtually enriched with a steadily increasing amount of georeferenced
content and instrumented with gadgets such as local transmitters and ambient displays
providing passers-by with additional information. At the same time, advances in mo-
bile computing technology led to powerful mobile devices such as smartphones able
to act as mediators to surrounding digital content. However, current solutions for ex-
ploring urban environments with the help of a mobile device still stick to traditional
approaches such as map representations.
This thesis is concerned with the investigation of advanced mobile user interfaces
for a more efficient, seamless, and intuitive exploration of urban environments. Its
main contribution is a series of novel techniques and appropriate fully functional pro-
totypes. The described technical realizations based on a custom auxiliary service
platform and respective functional trials help to gain insights into the possibilities and
challenges of such upcoming interface approaches.
Inspired by recent computing trends in industry and academia, the thesis presents
three novel mobile interaction prototypes. The proposed techniques range from a mo-
bile "attentive user interface" exploiting a human´s eye-gaze for discovering objects-
of-interest over a fully mobile solution for the detection of free-hand gestures to the
sophisticated vision-based interaction with embedded ambient displays.
Complementing these interaction concepts, the thesis introduces and investigates
novel visualization techniques for spatial information. Questioning the traditional
top-down map view for information-rich urban environments, three alternatives are
proposed: an egocentric approach and a bird´s eye perspective utilizing a 3D building
model rendered in real-time as well as an abstract information visualization which
emphasizes the contentual aspect of georeferenced information over its spatial com-
ponent.
To empirically validate the novel visualization concepts a comprehensive user
study was conducted. The presented evaluation focused on increasingly relevant as-
pects such as overviewing and filtering spatial information and demonstrates the ben-
efit of alternative mobile views and hybrid visualizations.