I took my boss Mark, and co-worker Dave, to the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland today for a tour. The lab's founding director, Dr. Ben Shneiderman, gave us a quick tour and had some of his researchers demonstrate a couple projects before taking us to lunch. Ben was engaging as always. First, we saw François Guimbretière's,

prototype mouse for older adults (2, 3), which consisted of an interesting new shell built around the guts of a small USB mouse. The sculpted form was generated from a CAD file on a Z Corp 3D

Printer. Another researcher was working with the National Institute on Aging to study older people's decisionmaking behaviors when confronted with a color-coded and labeled grid of choices to click in a web interface. Test participant's gaze on an LCD computer monitor is tracked by VisionTrak

Software taking eye movement data from the infrared sensors on a Polhemus ISCAN video based eye and target tracker. Naturally, I volunteered to try out the eye tracker (5). They had me fix my gaze at points across a calibration pattern, but some kind of triangulation error happened and we had to leave for lunch anyway. The head rig was lightweight, but somewhat cumbersome, and I had to quip, "this thing needs a couple drink holders!" Playing with the eye tracking hardware made me more excited to see the upcoming results of two eyetracking studies on our web site I commissioned from a west coast firm.

When I got back to the office, I went right into some meetings with one of my managers on production issues, but my assistant Pam handed me the hard copy of a report (7) on converged media newsrooms of the future published by IFRA, the international association for newspaper and media technology. The illustrated document showcases their prototype newsroom called Newsplex at the University

of South Carolina. Good reading for sometime this weekend.

- mike lee - washington, dc