Multi-touch User Interface Design for a City Modeling Application

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Multi-touch User Interface Design for a City Modeling Application"

By

Mr. Hengli Yin


Abstract

Multi-touch technology has been applied to many digital devices. 
Traditional user interface (UI) is not suitable for these devices since 
multi-touch technology provides a much different way of interaction. This 
thesis presents a city modeling application that adopts multi-touch as the 
main input method. The target platform is a multi-touch device equipped 
with a large horizontal screen and supports multi-user interaction. The 
application was designed to allow multiple users to quickly create and 
edit a simple model city collaboratively. The UI of the application is 
composed of two parts: a global navigation system and an editing system 
for individual users. Each part requires many different operations, such 
as view panning, view rotation and building creation. We designed and 
implemented a complete set of multi-touch interaction methods for these 
operations. The objectives are to make the UI intuitive, effective and 
user friendly, so that the users can easily learn to use the application 
and quickly build a city with it. To achieve this, we proposed several 
design guidelines: UI orientation-independence, intuitiveness, gesture 
simplicity and consistency. Finally, we designed some experiments and did 
a user study to evaluate the UI.


Date:			Friday, 26 August 2011

Time:			3:00pm – 5:00pm

Venue:			Room 5510
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Chiew-Lan Tai (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Long Quan (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Huamin Qu


**** ALL are Welcome ****