Dr. Thorsten Karrer

Alumnus

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Thorsten completed his PhD with distinction ("summa cum laude") on semantic navigation in digital media at the Media Computing Group under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers in 2013. To find out what he did next, check out our alumni page.

I was with the group until the end of August 2015. The following table gives a short overview on who took over my responsibilities:

Personal Orchestra	Christian and Philipp
ThoMoNetworking	Kerstin and Marcel
ThoKalmanTracker	Simon
DeliciousLabelMaker	Krishna
LaTeX Thesis Templates	Christian

Projects

Navigation in Digital Media along Non-Dominant Domains

DRAGON is a direct-manipulation interaction technique for frame-accurate navigation in video scenes.

Note at CHI 2008. Received Best Note Award. Note at CHI 2012. Full paper at GI 2012.

Fly is a novel Presentation Tool that breaks with the Slide Metaphor and assembles Information Landscapes on a 2D Plane.

Full paper at CHI 2009. Note at CHI 2012. Case study at CHI 2012.

Stacksplorer provides a novel way to visualize potential call stacks within a traditional IDE and allows navigation along these call stacks.

Full paper at UIST 2011. Full paper at CHI 2013. Received Honorable Mention Award.

PhaVoRIT is an advanced time-stretching algorithm based upon an improved phase vocoder.

Full paper at ICMC 2006.

Personal Orchestra lets visitors conduct the Vienna Philharmonic by controlling speed, volume, and the emphasis of different instrument sections.

Jounal Article in the Computer Music Journal 2005.

Smart Textiles and Flexible Devices

Pinstripe is a textile Sensor that enables eyes-free continuous Input anywhere on interactive Clothing.

Full paper at CHI 2011.

Me Hates This is a frustration expression system based on the sweet physicality of beating the crap out of your computer.

Work in Progress at CHI 2011.

TWEND explores Twisting and Bending as new interaction gestures in mobile devices.

Second place in the CHI 2008 student research competition.

Mudpad is a multitouch screen that is enhanced with localized active haptic feedback.

Note at ITS 2010. Received Best Note Award and Best Demo Award.

Large-Scale Installations

We developed Silhouettes an interactive city-building game. A group of 16 players can construct future urban spaces by forming buildings and vegetation with the shadows of their bodies on a large projection screen.

Silhouettes was installed inside the German-Chinese House at the World EXPO 2010 in Shanghai.

Side Projects

The i10 Thesis Template can help you write your thesis in LaTeX.

Downloaded over 20000 times.

ThoMoNetworking Framework makes it easy to write networked applications for Mac OS X and iOS.

Available on GitHub.

Our Dynamic Plugin Framework for Xcode makes it easy to develop and implement Xcode plugins that can be dynamically loaded and unloaded.

Xcode 3 only.

iEat lets you access the menu of your favorite Aachen Mensa via your OS X menu bar.

Available on the App Store.

JaPeThoPageIndicator serves your needs for this kind of view on the Mac platform. No more missing this useful iOS widget.

Comes in NSView and CALayer flavors.

ThoMoOFFViewer (OpenGL Core Profile Tutorial) is a simple viewer for 3D models that are stored as OFF files. Its main purpose is to serve as a demo code repository for people that want to learn writing OpenGL code using the version 3.2 Core Profile as it is implemented in MacOS X 10.7 Lion.

Also includes slides of a talk we gave at the August 2011 Cocoa Heads Aachen meeting.

ThoKalmanTracker is an Objective-C framework that implements a simple predictive Kalman Filter algorithm. It consists of a powerful and efficient matrix class (written using BLAS and CLAPACK) providing the mathematical capabilities and the Kalman tracker class itself.

Internal access only.

DeliciousLabelMaker Label Maker is a small software package that can be used to print library-style book spine labels for the i10 library. It can open the XML (pList) export format of the Delicious Library 3 software and uses CSS and JavaScript to create a web page displaying the labels. The web script is wrapped in a Cocoa app written in Swift to take care of the printing.

Internal access only.

Past Activities:

Working on a OmniGraffle Stencil file (896.72 Kb) containing some of the devices we have in the MediaSpace.
Worked on the AirGuitar project at CSIRO TFT.

Personal information:

Contact information (internal access)

ACM Author-izer direct links to the digital library

Me hates this: exploring different levels of user feedback for (usability) bug reporting

Florian Heller, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Moritz Wittenhagen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
CHI EA '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2011

Pinstripe: eyes-free continuous input on interactive clothing

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Florian Heller, Jan Borchers
CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2011

MudPad: tactile feedback for touch surfaces

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
CHI EA '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2011

MudPad: a tactile memory game

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
ITS '10 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, 2010

MudPad: tactile feedback and haptic texture overlay for touch surfaces

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
ITS '10 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, 2010

Pinstripe: eyes-free continuous input anywhere on interactive clothing

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Florian Heller, Jan Borchers
UIST '10 Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology,

Stacksplorer: understanding dynamic program behavior

Jan-Peter Krämer, Thorsten Karrer, Jonathan Diehl, Jan Borchers
UIST '10 Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology,

MudPad: localized tactile feedback on touch surfaces

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
UIST '10 Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology,

First-person cooking: a dual-perspective interactive kitchen counter

Sarah Mennicken, Thorsten Karrer, Peter Russell, Jan Borchers
CHI EA '10 Proceedings of the 28th of the international conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2010

PocketDRAGON: a direct manipulation video navigation interface for mobile devices

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Jan Borchers
MobileHCI '09 Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, 2009

Fly: a tool to author planar presentations

Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
CHI '09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2009

DRAGON: a direct manipulation interface for frame-accurate in-scene video navigation

Thorsten Karrer, Malte Weiss, Eric Lee, Jan Borchers
CHI '08 Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2008

Twend: twisting and bending as new interaction gesture in mobile devices

Gero Herkenrath, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
CHI EA '08 CHI '08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2008

Fly: an organic presentation tool

David Holman, Predrag Stojadinović, Thorsten Karrer, Jan Borchers
CHI EA '06 CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2006

iSymphony: an adaptive interactive orchestral conducting system for digital audio and video streams

Eric Lee, Henning Kiel, Saskia Dedenbach, Ingo Grüll, Thorsten Karrer, Marius Wolf, Jan Borchers
CHI EA '06 CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, 2006

Full List of Publications

( denotes a major peer-reviewed publication).

2016

Christian Corsten, Andreas Link, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Understanding Back-to-front Pinching for Eyes-free Mobile Touch Input. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, MobileHCI '16, pages 185–189, ACM, New York, NY, USA, Sept 2016.

2015

Simon Voelker, Christian Cherek, Jan Thar, Thorsten Karrer, Christian Thoresen, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. PERCs: Persistently Trackable Tangibles on Capacitive Multi-Touch Displays. In UIST '15: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, UIST '15, pages 6, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2015.

Christian Corsten, Christian Cherek, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. HaptiCase: Back-of-Device Tactile Landmarks for Eyes-Free Absolute Indirect Touch. In CHI '15: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 2171–2180,New York, NY, USA, April 2015.

2014

Jan-Peter Krämer, Joachim Kurz, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. How live coding affects developers' coding behavior. In VL/HCC '14: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pages 5-8,July 2014.

2013

Thorsten Karrer. Semantic Navigation in Digital Media. PhD Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, July 2013.

Jan-Peter Krämer, Thorsten Karrer, Joachim Kurz, Moritz Wittenhagen and Jan Borchers. How Tools in IDEs Shape Developers' Navigation Behavior. In CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 3073–3082, ACM, New York, NY, USA, April 2013.

2012

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen and Jan Borchers. DragLocks: Handling Temporal Ambiguities in Direct Manipulation Video Navigation. In CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,May 2012.

Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thomas Hess, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Fly: Studying Recall, Macrostructure Understanding, and User Experience of Canvas Presentations. In CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1307–1310,May 2012.

Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thomas Hess, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Canvas Presentations in the Wild. In CHI EA 2012: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, pages 537–540,May 2012.

Benjamin Walther-Franks, Marc Herrlich, Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Roland Schröder-Kroll, Rainer Malaka and Jan Borchers. Dragimation: Direct Manipulation Keyframe Timing for Performance-based Animation. In GI '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Graphics Interface Conference, pages 101–108,Toronto, Ont., Canada, Canada, May 2012.

Jan-Peter Krämer, Joachim Kurz, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Blaze: supporting two-phased call graph navigation in source code. In CHI '12: Extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA '12, pages 2195–2200, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2012.

Jan-Peter Krämer, Joachim Kurz, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Blaze. In Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2012, pages 1457–1458, IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2012.

2011

Thorsten Karrer, Jan-Peter Krämer, Jonathan Diehl, Björn Hartmann and Jan Borchers. Stacksplorer: Call Graph Navigation Helps Increasing Code Maintenance Efficiency. In UIST '11: Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pages 217–224,October 2011.

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input on Interactive Clothing. In CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1313–1322, ACM Press, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011.

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. MudPad: Tactile Feedback for Touch Surfaces. In CHI '11: Extended Abstracts of the twenty-ninth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 323–328, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, May 2011.

Florian Heller, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Moritz Wittenhagen, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Me Hates This: Exploring Different Levels of User Feedback for (Usability) Bug Reporting. In CHI '11: Extended Abstracts of the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1357–1362,2011.

2010

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. MudPad: Tactile Feedback and Haptic Texture Overlay for Touch Surfaces. In ITS '10: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 11–14, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2010.

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. MudPad - A Tactile Memory Game. In ITS '10: Adjunct Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 306–306, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2010.

Yvonne Jansen, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. MudPad: Localized Tactile Feedback on Touch Surfaces. In UIST '10: Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pages 385–386,New York, NY, October 2010.

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input Anywhere on Interactive Clothing. In UIST '10: Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 429–430,New York, NY, October 2010.

Jan-Peter Krämer, Thorsten Karrer, Jonathan Diehl and Jan Borchers. Stacksplorer: Understanding Dynamic Program Behavior. In Extended Abstracts of the ACM UIST 2010 Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology,New York, NY, October 2010.

Jonathan Diehl, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Interactive System Architecture for Layered Applications. In Interactive System Architecture Workshop, Misc, August 2010.

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Leonhard Lichtschlag and Jan Borchers. ExamPen: How digital pen technology can support teachers and examiners. In CHI '10: Workshop on Next Generation of HCI and Education, Misc, Atlanta, USA, April 2010.

Sarah Mennicken, Thorsten Karrer, Peter Russell and Jan Borchers. First-Person Cooking: A Dual-Perspective Interactive Kitchen Counter. In CHI '10: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 3403–3408, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, April 2010.

2009

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen and Jan Borchers. PocketDRAGON: a direct manipulation video navigation interface for mobile devices. In MobileHCI '09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, pages 47:1–47:3, ACM, September 2009.

Leonhard Lichtschlag, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Fly: a Tool to Author Planar Presentations. In CHI 2009: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 547–556, ACM Press, Boston, MA, USA, April 2009.

2008

Gero Herkenrath, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. TWEND: Twisting and Bending as new Interaction Gesture in Mobile Devices. In Extended Abstracts of CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM Press, Florence, Italy, April 2008.

Thorsten Karrer, Malte Weiss, Eric Lee and Jan Borchers. DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation. In CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 247–250, ACM Press, Florence, Italy, April 2008.

2007

Eric Lee, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. An Analysis of Startup and Dynamic Latency in Phase Vocoder-Based Time-Stretching Algorithms. In ICMC '07: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, pages 73–80,Copenhagen, Denmark, August 2007.

Eric Lee, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Improving Interfaces for Navigating Continuous Audio Timelines. In CHI '07: Workshop on Supporting Non-Professional Users in the New Media Landscape, Misc, San Jose, USA, April 2007.

2006

Thorsten Karrer, Eric Lee and Jan Borchers. PhaVoRIT: A Phase Vocoder for Real-Time Interactive Time-Stretching. In ICMC '06: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, pages 708–715,New Orleans, USA, November 2006.

Jonathan Diehl, David Holman, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. The Associative PDA: An organic user interface for mobile personal information management. In UbiComp '06: Extended Abstracts of the 2006 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing,September 2006.

Eric Lee, Henning Kiel, Saskia Dedenbach, Ingo Gruell, Thorsten Karrer, Marius Wolf and Jan Borchers. iSymphony: An Adaptive Interactive Orchestral Conducting System for Conducting Digital Audio and Video Streams. In CHI '06: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 259–262, ACM Press, Montréal, Canada, April 2006.

David Holman, Predrag Stojadinovic, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Fly: an organic presentation tool. In CHI '06: Extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pages 863–868, ACM, New York, NY, USA, April 2006.

Eric Lee, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Toward a Framework for Interactive Systems to Conduct Digital Audio and Video Streams. In Computer Music Journal, pages 21–36, number 1, March 2006.

2005

Thorsten Karrer. PhaVoRIT: A Phase Vocoder for Real-Time Interactive Time-Stretching. Diploma Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, November 2005.