Distributed Tabletops: Supporting Remote and Mixed-Presence Tabletop Collaboration

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• Phil Tuddenham (University of Cambridge Computer Lab)
• Thursday 04 October 2007, 14:15-15:15
• Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room SS03.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Cecily Morrison.

I’ll be practicing two 15 min presentations that I’ll be giving at TABLETOP 2007 next week.

Abstract for “T3: Rapid Prototyping of High-Resolution and Mixed-Presence Tabletop Applications”: Multi-person tabletop applications that require a high display resolution, such as collaborative web-browsing, are currently very difficult to create. Tabletop systems that support mixed-presence collaboration, where some collaborators are remote, are also hard to build. As a consequence, investigation of some important tabletop applications has been rather limited. In this paper, we present T3, a software toolkit that addresses these challenges. T3 allows researchers to rapidly create high-resolution multi-person tabletop applications for co-located or remote collaborators. It uses multiple projectors to create a single seamless high-resolution tabletop display, and allows multiple tabletops to be connected together to support mixed-presence collaboration. This engineering is hidden behind a simple, flexible API . T3 also supports existing user interface components, including buttons and spreadsheets, allowing the rapid creation of complex tabletop applications.

Abstract for “Distributed Tabletops: Supporting Remote and Mixed-Presence Tabletop Collaboration”: Mixed-presence tabletop interfaces aim to support collaboration between remote groups. However, it is unclear why tabletop interaction techniques should be important for mixed-presence or remote collaboration, and recent projects in this area differ as to which elements of tabletop interaction they choose to support. In this paper we discuss the benefits of tabletop interaction for mixed-presence and remote collaboration. In particular, we wish to support the natural tabletop awareness mechanisms of territoriality, orientation and consequential communication. We derive design guidelines for such systems and present Distributed Tabletops, a novel system that can be customised to investigate various mixed-presence tasks. Our early observations of Distributed Tabletops in use validate our design guidelines.

This talk is part of the Rainbow Interaction Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Cambridge talks
• Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, Room SS03
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Rainbow Interaction Seminars
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events

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