Lean & Zoom: Semantic Zoom and user experience evolution.

Spring 2010

Student

Kaimin Hu

Advisor

Anind Dey

Project description

Lean and Zoom: Semantic Zooming and User experience evolution Project Background:

Lean &Zoom is revolutionary software that has been developed to make the work on the computer easier on the eyes and posture by using the camera to sense the movement of the face and to magnify the on-screen content proportionally. This software can be used on any computer or phone as well as serve as a base for developing other applications.

Current Stage:

Geometric (Standard) Zooming: The view depends on the physical properties of what is being viewed. Lean & Zoom works on any electronic platform (Computer, cellphones) with a camera embedded on the same surface of the screen. User could zoom the content shown in the screen by just lean to the screen, without using keyboard. Now Lean & Zoom is capable with pictures and documents. This is called Geometric(Standard)Zooming.

Method to improve experiences:

During the 2010 Las Vegas CES, Lean & Zoom gain a high reputation, at the mean time, a lot of customers also gives feed back to help Lean & Zoom work more efficient and precisely.
Thus, Lean & Zoom team reviewed those user feedbacks and starting a research to apply Semantic Zooming concepts into the Lean & Zoom. Semantic Zooming is a non-graphical zoom called semantic zoom is a mechanism to do the view transformation from any view formats to the underlying meaning inside the target object. Normally this mechanism reaches into the derived data contained in the data table stage.

Improvement ideas (part):

1. Associate Lean & Zoom with map tools: instead of zoom the entire map, but zoom into the specific point. i.e. when user needs to zoom into New York City from the overview map of USA.
2. Apply Lean & Zoom in viewing a person's picture, i.e. on social activity website, zoom a picture will return that object's (could be human being or any other objects) detail that is being zoomed.
3. One of the visitor from CES suggested Lean & Zoom could be also applied in gaming industry, especially in First Person Shooter (FPS) games. i.e. zooming with sniper, zooming with telescopes.

My Approach:

I believe apply Lean & Zoom with map tool is very useful in many situations, not only in daily life but also in the army duty. During 2010 CES, one of the officers from Defense Department indicates that Lean & Zoom would help solider search on the electronic map more efficient without using hands by just changing head and eye position. To start with, I would like to do research study on how to implement "Catch eye's movement" first and then associate Lean & Zoom with Google Map API.

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