collaborative interaction through spatially aware moving displays
In many real life situations, people work together using each their own computers. In practice, besides personal communication, such situations often involve exchanging documents and other digital objects. Since people are working in a common physical space, it is a natural idea to enlarge the virtual space to a common area where they can exchange objects while taking advantage of the collaborators' physical proximity. In this work we propose a way to allow collaboration through the interaction with objects in a common virtual workspace built on the top of tablet PCs. The concepts of dynamic multiple displays and real world position tracking are implemented exploiting the tablet's embodied resources such as webcam, touch-screen and stylus. Also, a multiplayer game was implemented to show how users can exchange information through intercommunicating tablets. We performed user tests to demonstrate the feasibility of collaborative tasks in such environment, and drawn conslusions regarding the impact of the new paradigm of extended multi-user workspaces.
user interfaces tabletop applications interactive devices and techniques interaction metaphors