News from the HIFIV research group:

• Fall 2018: To end my sabbatical, I spent two months working within the world-class group of researchers at the Aviz Lab in Paris.
  
  
• Summer 2018: Thanks so much to Prof. Xiaoru Yuan and his students for hosting me for 3 weeks in his lab at Peking University in Beijing, as well as at ChinaVis 2018 in Shanghai! I have never seen such hard-working, dedicated students!
  
  
• Summer 2017: For my first sabbatical get-away, I had a fantastic time at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, working in Ken Hinckley's EPIC (Extended Perception, Interaction, & Cognition) group, from May 22 to September 1. I learned to develop with C# and Unity for the HoloLens, and worked with some truly brilliant researchers. I also discovered that a lifestyle involving lots of exercise made me feel about 10 years younger, so I will endeavor to keep that up :-)
  
  Shortly after getting back to Montreal, I followed some advice of my student Erwan Normand and learned to use the OpenCV and ArUco libraries, thanks to George Lecakes' tutorial which shows how to compile and use the libraries within Visual Studio.
  
  
• Summer 2016: Our department has purchased 20 Samsung Galaxy Note Pro tablets, each with a 12 inch screen and a pressure-sensitive stylus. Each tablet is lent to a team of students who modify the source code of an Android app to experiment with touch-and-stylus interaction for sketching in 3D.
  (more information)
  
  
• May 2016: I demonstrate simple 3D graphics in JavaScript with no 3D libraries
  (more information)
  
  
• April 2016: Rapid prototyping of the user experience of a 30 to 35 degree field-of-view, to decide whether we should order a HoloLens or not.
  
  
• 2015: JWinPointer.jar is a Java library for multitouch and stylus pen input events on Microsoft Windows 10
  
  
• April 2015: I visited Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and gave a talk (30:42-54:38) along with Professors Roel Vertegaal, Pourang Irani, and Shengdong Zhao. Thanks to Ken Hinckley for hosting us!
  
  
• Summer 2014: FinanceVis.net is live and will be presented as a poster by Maxime Dumas at IEEEVIS 2014 in Paris, France.
  
  Links to FinanceVis.net and to the teaser video
  
  
• March 2014: As part of his sabbatical, Professor Renaud Blanch visits our lab for 2 weeks (March 10-21).
  
  
• October 2013: François Cabrol, Shrey Gupta, Jean-François Im, Sébastien Rufiange, and Michael McGuffin travel to Santa Clara, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Marseille, France; to present 4 papers and 1 poster at BigDataVis 2013, IEEE VIS 2013, and CMMR 2013.
  
  
  
  
• Congratulations to François Cabrol for getting his paper about GenSession accepted at CMMR 2013 !
  
  
• Congratulations to Jean-François Im for getting his paper about VisReduce accepted at BigDataVis 2013 !
  
  
• Congratulations to Jean-François Im and Sébastien Rufiange for each getting papers accepted at IEEE InfoVis 2013 ! Also, congratulations to Shrey Gupta for getting his poster accepted at the same event !
  
  
• Sébastien Rufiange successfully defends his doctoral dissertation on June 28, 2013, with Prof. Anastasia Bezerianos as external examiner.
  
  
• Sébastien Rufiange gives an invited presentation of our TreeMatrix paper at EuroVis 2013.
  
  
• May 2013: several of us configured our smartphones to track our GPS position over one month, to generate movement data for a research project. To create interesting meeting events in the data that we collected, in addition to having regular research meetings at ETS, we also met for some group restaurant meals (purely for research purposes, of course).
  
  
  
  
• Summer 2013: we welcome two summer interns, Céline Pelletier and Anirban Mukherjee, to the lab!
  
  
• October 2012: Maxime Dumas and Sébastien Rufiange travel to Seattle, Washington, to attend IEEE VisWeek 2012.
  
  
• October 2012 (images below): A HIFIV brainstorming session around the user interface of a prototype zoomable whiteboard application that uses novel multitouch radial menus. Three instances of the prototype were running to be played with: one on a 32-inch 3M multitouch display, and two more on 10-inch Android tablets. The prototype was itself used to sketch alternative user interfaces (and food) during brainstorming.
  
  
  
  
• September 2012 (image below): We visited iBurger for lunch, to try out their touch screen tables for ordering.
  
  
  
  
• June 2012: Christophe Viau travels to Vienna, Austria to present a paper at EuroVis 2012. Congratulations, Christophe!
  
  
• Summer 2012: Jean-François Im travels to Vancouver, British Columbia, for a summer research internship at SAP.
  
  
• Summer 2012 (image below): Our department has purchased approximately 20 Android tablets to be lent to undergraduate students for assignments involving Android user interface programming. The image below shows an experimental multitouch radial menu.
  
  
  
  
• Winter 2012: Undergraduate students in McGuffin's course prototype several multitouch musical instruments, as well as visualizations of a network of influences between over 600 musicians and musical groups.
  Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yH9ifBvK6o
  
  
  
  
• March 2012: Luc Trudeau, sponsored by HIFIV, develops a free Java/JavaCV/OpenCV implementation of Andy Wilson's vision-based, bimanual TAFFI interface, for use in teaching and research.
  Source code for Trudeau's implementation: HERE
  Video of Trudeau's implementation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS73m8JJtkM
  Wilson's 2006 paper, describing the TAFFI algorithm: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1166253.1166292
  
  
  
  
• Fall 2011: Professor Guy Melançon begins a 1-year sabbatical at ETS.
  
  
• July 2011 (image below): Thai food at a HIFIV brainstorming meeting...
  
  
  
  
• Early 2011: Erick Velazquez-Godinez's prototype network visualization software can automatically identify chains (blue), bicomponents (orange), trees (purple), and sets of nodes having the same neighbors (pink).
  Click on the image below for an enlarged version.
  
  
  
  
• 2011 (image below): Thanks to an internal grant, ETS is now equipped with 4 workstations with 3M multitouch screens, for use in undergraduate teaching and graduate student research projects.
  
  
  
  
• October 2010: Christophe Viau presents his paper at IEEE VisWeek 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Congratulations, Christophe!
  
  
• June 2010: Erick Velazquez-Godinez and Michael McGuffin implement a novel 2-handed navigation technique for 3D.
  Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggoLLnxHwhA
  
  
  
  
• May 2010: Professor Ivan Viola visits the lab!
  
  
• March 2010: Roberto Lopez-Hernandez and Mike McGuffin travel to Taipei, Taiwan to present their paper at PacificVis 2010.
  
  
• Winter term, 2010: as an assignment in LOG745, undergraduate students design and prototype simple multitouch applications.
  Click on the image below for an enlarged version.
  
  
  
  
• February 2010 (images below): 1920×2160 pixel, 37×42 inch (56 inch diagonal) multitouch surface (made with two 1920×1080 pixel, 42 inch displays), designed and built by Christophe Viau (a Ph.D. student supervised by Mike McGuffin) and Jean-François Lahos, and purchased by our department to be used in teaching and research.
  
  
  
  
• December 2009: Roberto Lopez-Hernandez has been working hard developing a volume renderer in C++ with a GLSL fragment shader.
  Click on the image below for an enlarged version.
  
  
  
  
• October 2009: Sébastien Rufiange travels to France to present his paper at IHM 2009 and also visits the Aviz visualization lab. Congratulations, Sébastien!
  
  
• Winter term, 2009: as an assignment in LOG740, undergraduate students modify a simple First-Person Shooter game, written in C# by Martin Poirier, that uses a Wiimote as the input device.
  Click on the image below for an enlarged version.
  
  
  
  
• "Information visualization: a very brief, 8 thousand year survey" - A talk (in French) given at the SAT (Société des arts technologiques), in Montreal, April 29, 2008.
  
  Video:
  with English description
  with French description
  on youtube