Zomit: A Zoomable User Interface

Zomit is a generic package for developing zoomable user interfaces (ZUIs) that can aid in navigating large information spaces.

Zomit includes new navigation (focus+context) aids and a new interaction model based on control menus. A control menu is a new type of popup menu that is visually similar to a Pie Menu.

Zomit has a client/server architecture and the client was written in Java so that it can be used over the Internet. So please try one of the demos.

Zomit was developped by Stuart Pook as part of his doctoral thesis at the ENST under the direction of Eric Lecolinet and as part of Infobiogen's VisuGene project. It was financed by the European Union contract BIO4-CT96-0346 and the France Télécom R&D contract 97 754 21. I would like to thank Claude Kintzig and Gérard Poulain of France Télécom R&D, as well as Guy Vaysseix and Emmanuel Barillot of Infobiogen, for their help during this project.

This project is now finished.

Presentations and Videos

Our AVI 2000 presentation (with 2 videos) and our IHM-HCI 2001 presentation (3 videos) discuss our new context aids and control menus. Our ERGO-IHM 2000 presentation, in French, includes 4 videos and some additional details. Our CHI 2000 presentation of control menus including 2 videos is also available. This presentation in French for RJC-IHM 2000 includes 4 videos and describes Zomit's context aids and the use of control menus. We made a video (19Mb Microsoft RLE8 Video Codec with audio) in May 1999 that describes some of Zomit's early features. In 2001, the HyperVise project presented at IHM HCI 2001 a video in French (28Mb, Sorenson Video 3 & Qualcomm PureVoice) that compares how different types of interfaces, including a ZUI, can be used to visualize a virtual library.

Publications

The Zomit project is decribed in:

Stuart Pook. Interaction and Context in Zoomable User Interfaces. Doctoral thesis, École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, France, June 2001.

A description of control menus and of use of transparency to provide new context aids for navigation in ZUIs was published in:

Stuart Pook, Eric Lecolinet, Guy Vaysseix, and Emmanuel Barillot. Context and interaction in zoomable user interfaces. Proceedings of AVI 2000, pages 227-231 & 317, Palermo, Italy, May 2000. ACM Press.

A longer description of our new context aids and an extended discussion of the properties of control menus are presented in this article in French:

Stuart Pook, Eric Lecolinet, Guy Vaysseix, and Emmanuel Barillot. Des aides transparentes de navigation et un nouveau type de menu pour les interfaces zoomables. Proceedings of ERGO-IHM 2000, pages 170-177, Biarritz, France, October 2000.

Control menus are described in:

Stuart Pook, Eric Lecolinet, Guy Vaysseix, and Emmanuel Barillot. Control Menus: Execution and Control in a Single Interactor. In CHI 2000 Extended Abstracts, pages 263-264, The Hague, The Netherlands, April 2000. ACM Press.

This paper in French gives a quick overview of our new navigation and context aids and of our control menus:

Stuart Pook, Eric Lecolinet, Guy Vaysseix, and Emmanuel Barillot. Contexte et interaction dans les interfaces zoomables. Proceedings of RJC-IHM 2000, pages 57-60, L'Île de Berder, France, May 2000. Laboratoire VALORIA (Université de Bretagne-Sud).

The use of a Zoomable User Interface to navigate in a genetic database and the client/server architecture of Zomit that makes navigation possible over the Internet was described in a paper published in Bioinformatics. The (now very out of date) source for the version of Zomit and ZoomMap described in this paper is available.

Stuart Pook, Guy Vaysseix, and Emmanuel Barillot. Zomit: biological data visualization and browsing. Bioinformatics, 14(9):807-814, October 1998.

The Zomit ZUI development tool was used to develop a Zoomable User Interface to a virtual library. This interface will be used to compare the advantages and disadvantages of ZUIs, 3D virtual worlds and 2D representations of trees in browsing virtual libraries.

Eric Lecolinet, Jean-Daniel Fekete, and Stuart Pook. Bibliothèques : comparaisons entre le réel et le virtuel en 3D, 2D zoomable et 2D arborescent. Proceedings of ASTI 2001, pages 24-25, Paris, France, 24-27 April 2001.
Patricia Plénacoste, Eric Lecolinet, Stuart Pook, Cédric Dumas and Jean-Daniel Fekete. Bibliothèques : comparaisons entre le réel et le virtuel en 3D, 2D zoomable et 2D arborescent. IHM HCI 2001, Lille, France, 10-14 September 2001.

These two journal articles in French describe our context aids, the control menu, some applications of these techniques and the implementation of Zomit.

Stuart Pook, Eric Lecolinet, Guy Vaysseix, and Emmanuel Barillot. « Control menus » et vues contextuelles pour les interfaces zoomables. Revue d'Interaction Homme-Machine, 4(1):59-84, Europia, France, 2003.
Eric Lecolinet and Stuart Pook. Interfaces zoomables et « Control menus » : Techniques focus+contexte pour la navigation interactive dans les bases de données. Les cahiers du numérique, 3(3):191-210, Lavoisier, France, December 2002.

Related Work

The Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland (USA) is developping Jazz (another Zoomable User Interface written in Java). Pad++ was one of the first ZUIs and their web page has links to different papers discussing ZUIs.

Pie Menus were developped by Don Hopkins. Marking menus were developped by Gordon Kurtenbach and William Buxton. FaST Sliders were proposed in 2002 as an extension of Marking Menus. FlowMenus, by François Guimbretière and Terry Winograd, are another way of integrating command entry and direct manipulation. They differ from Control Menus in that they allow the entry of multiple commands in a single gesture.

[This page's URL: http://www.infres.enst.fr/net/zomit/. This page was written by Stuart Pook. Modified 2003/09/02 15:49:33 CEST.]