The BubbleFish: Bringing Digital Document Management into the Physical World

This paper introduces the BubbleFish project, in terms of the main idea, related work, and a set of possible prototypical implementations. The BubbleFish is a digital document manager that uses Augmented Reality to let its users maintain digital documents in the physical environment, as an alternative to the currently dominating file/folder approach in desktop based computer systems. The user moves documents in and out of a virtual stage, currently the computer screen, and is able to freely position the documents spatially, e.g. on the desk, in a shelf or a drawer. The framework of interaction provided follows the principles of direct manipulation, but takes the issue of directness at the interface further by providing an interaction space that blends the virtual and the physical world. Introduction This paper will introduce the BubbleFish project. In short, I will present the BubbleFish concept for how to allow the desktop computer user to manage his or her documents in the physical space surrounding the computer. Management of all digital documents—be it wordprocessing documents, pictures, or organizational budgets—is currently restricted to putting files (i.e. documents) into folders (i.e. hierarchical separators); a hierarchical tree-like system promoted and implemented in basically all available operating systems. Digital document management was chosen as it should be considered as one of the most frequent everyday concerns of computer use: how to store, retrieve and maintain digital documents. As mentioned, in today’s computer systems documents are stored as files within folder hierarchies. The problem is that we often find it intricate to organize digital documents using this approach. Rekimoto (1999) argues that it is difficult to correctly classify documents into specific folders as some documents may belong to two or more categories, or insufficiently match a user’s subjective folder system. For the same reasons, finding a document is also a difficult task, which is especially true for digitized data such as images, audio and video where there is currently no apparent mechanism available to perform searches on content (Rekimoto, 1999). The starting point for this project was hence to question the currently applied view of how digital documents should be managed, and specifically find a new way of allowing users to manage digital documents in desktop computing. The paper will also consider related work in the field of Human—Computer Interaction (HCI), and present three possible and simple implementations of the concept, each with their individual pros and cons. Paper Context and Course Themes The context of this project, which is currently expanded upon an run as a research project at Interactive Institute’s Umeå Studio, is the graduate course “Trends in Human—Computer Interaction”, given by Prof. John Waterworth in the Department of Informatics at Umeå University during the spring of 2000. During this course, three main themes (i.e. trends in HCI) were introduced through lectures, exemplified by papers in a comprehensive course reader, and discussed thoroughly by the class. To a large extent, this work has its origins in the course activities and in these themes. The themes or trends considered during the course were: synaesthetic media; using 3D space; and Intimate Systems and Physical—Virtual World Bridges. Specifically, in the BubbleFish project, I draw extensively on the trend presented as “Using 3D space” and “Physical—Virtual World Bridges”.