Large Multi-Touch Vertical Displays in Multi-User Competitive Tasks

Large vertical displays (LVDs) are starting to appear in different realities. There are many exhibition and fairs that are starting to employ LVDs to show information and commercials, dynamically and interactively thanks also to the LVDs' touch capabilities. LVDs are becoming more relevant also in the workplaces since they allow to host virtually remote participants and show much information at the same time. Schools and Universities began to test LVD capabilities to support professors in a lecture by allowing them to show documents, videos and take notes, all at the same time. LVDs potentiality are in their very wide resolution which is capable of hosting much information at the same time and in the fact that they are connected to a computer, which means instant internet access, where a tremendous quantity of information is immediately usable. However, this huge resolution is not easy to exploit. Too much information might be confusing and the user might also not benefit from a simple piece of information presented in an inefficient way. Fortunately there are some research that studied how to present information on LVDs. Another important LVDs topic is user interaction with these kind of devices. There are two main approaches to do this: through mouse and keyboard or using touch capabilities. Both approaches have pros and cons and their preference should depend on the used application. Actually, in the beginning touch detection systems suffered from being imprecise and unreliable. However with the introduction of the possibility to interact with LVDs through a suitable and more reliable multitouch input system, a new frontier of interaction between human and machine --- or human-computer interaction --- was possible and consequently new possibilities and challenges were revealed. During recent years, many studies were conducted on the combination of LVDs and multitouch systems related to their usage in science, visualization, schools and in the workplace, and to provide directives on how they should be employed. However, there are still many questions and open problems that are preventing LVDs to enter in many realities where they may improve many tasks. One of these question is that there is no precise methodology to create an interface of such a resolution. Another question is that it is not clear yet which is the most efficient way to interact with LVDs. Eventually there is still a lot of research to do in the direction of how humans interact with these large devices either alone, in pairs or in a group. There are several interesting studies about these open questions, but they are only starting points, as also stated within their conclusions. This thesis gives a contribution to the human-computer interaction literature by studying the problem of a collaborative-competitive task using an LVD with multitouch capabilities. We conduct a user study comparing the behavior and the results of groups of users performing the same task using a traditional approach and then using an application for an LVD. We want to understand how people interact with the display and with one another as a group when each user has a personal goal in addition to a shared one. Furthermore, we want also understand if technology can help reduce the frustration of a collaborative-competitive task compared to the traditional approach. At the same time we provide suggestions on how a scalable user interface for simple application can be implemented using a library to implement scalable vector graphics, or SVG.