Today is my birthday and I got very nice present..;) I am really pleased to write it here – my paper “A Dual-Mode User Interface for Accessing 3D Content on the World Wide Web” has been accepted for inclusion in the WWW 2012 in Lyon, France. Selection was very competitive: only 12% of papers, i.e. 108 out of 885 properly completed submissions, could be accepted as full papers in the technical program of WWW 2012!

See the abstract below:

The Web evolved from a text-based system to the current rich and interactive medium that supports images, 2D graphics, audio and video. The major media type that is still missing is 3D graphics. Although various approaches have been proposed (most notably VRML/X3D), they have not been widely adopted. One reason for the limited acceptance is the lack of 3D interaction techniques that are optimal for the hypertext-based Web interface. We present a novel strategy for accessing integrated information spaces, where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and linked. We introduce a user interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime: the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions "don't-make-me-think" mode, where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive 3D "take-me-to-the-Wonderland" mode, which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. A user study is presented, which characterizes the user interface in terms of its efficiency and usability.

As I have mentioned in one of the previous posts, I am also organizing "Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture (Dec3D2012)" workshop at the WWW conference. See the call for papers on the workshop website!

The aim of the workshop is to encourage researchers from both the Web and 3D graphics communities to meet and talk about an integration of interactive 3D graphics capabilities into the Web technology stack. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for the communities, in which participants can:

• Present and discuss approaches to publishing 3D graphics on the Web in a declarative way;
• Discuss how the general principles, that are/were valid for the Web, translate to 3D declarative graphics, what are the difficulties, how can that goal be achieved in the current ecosystem of web development;
• Explore how the incorporation of declarative 3D graphics can be done in currently popular web browsers; we expect to showcase innovative applications that deeply integrate 3D graphics and HTML, among others, Fraunhofer and DFKI will report on X3DOM and XML3D as models for an easy to use 3D hypermedia publishing frameworks;
• Shape the agenda and identify upcoming research issues for the next development stage of the 3D Web.

The workshop will serve as a forum for the confluence of new and multidisciplinary ideas that will help to drive research in the area of 3D graphics on the Web.

The conference was really well organized (thanks to the sponsors: ACM SIGGRAPH, Web3D Consortium, and SYSTEMATIC). I presented my “Taskonomy of 3D Web Use” (see the paper). Some interesting talks (apart from mine of course!) included: “MPEG-4-based adaptive remote rendering for video games” by Nicolas Tizon, “ToBoA-3D: an architecture for managing top-down and bottom-up annotated 3D objects and spaces on the web” by Fabio Pittarello, Dynamic and Interactive Aspects of X3DOM by Johannes Behr. There were very interesting keynotes from Alain CHESNAIS (Visual Transitions and ACM President) and Neil TREVETT (Nvidia, Khronos Group President) – the guy behind WebGL.

On the 2nd day of the conference, the "Fete de la Musique" took place in the streets of Paris. It is above all a free popular "fete", open to any participant (amateur or professional musicians) who wants to perform in it. We (me and Iza) really enjoyed listening to different bands (one group was actually playing just in front of our hotel, so we could sit on our balcony and relax).

On the last day of the conference I took part in a W3C Incubator/Community Group Meeting. The mission of the Declarative 3D for the Web Architecture Incubator/Community Group is to determine the requirements, options, and use cases for an integration of interactive 3D graphics capabilities into the W3C technology stack. This group is aimed to extract core features out of the requirements as foundation to propose feasible technical solutions. These should cover the majority of 3D use cases for the Web – but not necessarily all of them. The group aims at creating the necessary technical and organizational prerequisites to eventually start a W3C Working Group. Above is a photo from the meeting.

On the Friday morning (10.00am, 03.06.2011), I set up my presentation in the conference room in DERI. At first there were only several people – the closest friends. Later, more and more people started to appear. The examination committee was 15 minutes late – I think Stefan and the examiners – prof. Manfred Hauswirth (internal examiner) and prof. Peter Brusilovsky (external examiner) had to talk about the procedure. When they finally arrived, I was asked to present my work.

I think that the presentation went quite well, having that I had to polish up my presentation a night before (thanks Stefan for your constructive comments!). Iza claims I was actually not too bad (she said she’s seen me much, much worse), and the timing was just right. As for the reviewers and the audience, they did not seem to be too bored with it either.

Then we had time for questions from the public. I thinks there were 3 questions: Peter asked about the POI navigation techniques that I decided to use, Slawek asked about design methodologies (apart from Shneiderman’s “Three Pillars”) that could be used in any (not-trivial) design process. Maciej asked me what I think about the future of web interfaces.

After a short break for the committee to agree on the “examination strategy”, I was invited to answer some tough questions. After 1.5h of lively discussion, I was yet again asked to leave the room for about 5 min and then invited again to hear the final verdict: I have passed the PhD exam. In Ireland, the viva is not the last stage of the PhD studies. My reviewers asked me to introduce some corrections to my manuscript before submitting the final version to the Exams Office at NUIG.

Here, I would like to thank everyone who supported me, prof. Stefan Decker (my supervisor), prof. Manfred Hauswirth and prof. Peter Brusilovsky (my examiners), and the whole DERI team, my family, and finally – Iza.

The work is done – I can go and sleep now...