Yesterday I did the last step in my Media Informatics master endeavor: I presented my master thesis. After quite a few months of development on the Microsoft Surface, the application that resulted was a good start for a (possible) commercial product. We started from the idea that a multitouch table device would offer more space, possibilities and opportunities to improve the collaboration and communication in the brainstorming phase of any project. This evolved very much during the development and conceiving the master thesis. It became a tool which not only supported and enhanced collaboration, but also, to name a few: offered clues gathered […]

Overview of my Master thesis, it summarizes the work by presenting the contributions to the research field and also the future work based on the already created prototype. The Breiny application is meant to support the Brainstorming process by using computers in a modern way – Natural User Interface. After creating the prototype, a User Evaluation was used to prove or disprove the theoretical hypotheses

The Evaluation session started with the Prototype presentation. This was targeted only on the User Interfaces, explaining how and which actions can be performed with each area of interest (UserControls and Main SurfaceWindow from Implementation Chapter). The users were encouraged to experience the interface and ask questions during the presentation, in order to understand better the interaction with the prototype.

The theoretical evaluation of the thesis work starts with by assessing in which measure the research questions were answered by the proposed concept. Then, the analysis will focus on the comparison of the implemented prototype’s features with the ones presented in Related work, in order to see which ones were implemented and how the prototype’s features map on the array of desired ones.

The prototype implementation tries to follow as close as possible the recommended architectural patterns and guidelines. To support the argumentation, a class diagram will be presented to give a visual orientation through the prototype implementation presentation. The built prototype supporting Brainstorming Sessions on Microsoft Surface, further named Breiny, was developed as part of this thesis and uses all the above framework features.

This section will present the Breiny application’s user interface and the available interactions with it, features which will be evaluated by the users. Following the requirements for extensibility, modularity and flexibility, the subsequent visible objects were separated into several user controls.

is article presents the system architecture and the underlying decisions that were taken to achieve the above requirements. The system requires a repository for sessions, a repository for Brainstorming items and a native Windows application for achieving the baseline of desired features. Thus, a distributed client – server architecture is considered, exemplified here.

In this section the application requirements will be presented. They are split into functional and non-functional ones. The first refers to all the features needed to be implemented, while the second category refers to performance, extensibility and scalability of the system.

There are two sets of features that must or can be implemented: the first ones which regulate the brainstorming activity as a set of rules; the second ones add productivity to the process, enabling additional scenarios that improve the user experience.