subArctic UI Toolkit
Research into visual effects and transformations for an extensible Java user interface toolkit.
In 1996, while an undergrad in Georgia Tech's Computer Science department I did my senior research project under my favorite professor, Scott Hudson. He had built an experimental Java UI toolkit called subArctic. It supported interactive layout constraints, visual layers, and extensible APIs, letting developers experiment with new interaction ideas, many of which would become popular a decade later on smart phones.
Transforming interface output
My specific research project focused on “drawable hacks”: applying transformations to interface output. Working with Ian Smith, I explored affine transformations of images, including scaling, rotation, and other visual effects. These techniques could change how an interface was drawn without requiring each control to be rewritten, similar to modern CSS.
The original project screenshots show some of those experiments:
The paper
The work contributed to the academic research paper “Systematic Output Modification in a 2D User Interface Toolkit,” by W. Keith Edwards, Scott E. Hudson, Joshua Marinacci, Roy Rodenstein, Thomas Rodriguez, and Ian Smith, published at UIST 1997, pages 151–158. The paper describes composing output transformations using wrappers and related toolkit mechanisms, and discusses adapting input handling to transformed output. Read the paper, or visit its ACM publication record.