Although various visualization techniques have been proposed for information retrieval tasks, most of them are based on a single strategy for viewing and navigating through the information space, and vague knowledge such as a fragment of the name of the object is not effective for the search. In contrast, people usually look for things using various vague clues simultaneously.For example, in a library, people can not only walk through the shelves to find a book they have in mind, but also they can be reminded of the author's name by viewing the books on the shelf and check the index cards to get more information.To enable such realistic search strategies, we developed a multiple-view information rerneval system where data visualization, keyword search, and category search are integrated with the same smooth zooming interface, and any vague knowledge about the data can be utilized to narrow the search space. Users can navigate through the information space at will, by modifying the search area in each view.

We implemented blow displays, which provide force feelings with no contact. Although blow displays can use only wind velocities and directions to represent information, they are less intrusive and less visually polluting to other media than other displays. We propose collaborative ambient systems to utilize blow displays' characteristics of spatiality and compatibility with other media. In collaborative ambient systems, blow displays direct the user to displays that provide rich information. Blow displays can also express information auxiliary to the main content the user is attending to. In this paper, we describe some ongoing applications and discuss their benefits and issues.

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