Collaboration with Interactive Walls and Tables

Introduction In contrast to the widely accepted availability of computer support in today's work environments, the productivity of face-to-face collaboration has not yet significantly improved from the days of conventional group work. Instead, during face-to-face collaboration, information technology is usually abandoned in favor of traditional media and forms of interaction. Therefore, a promising approach to support face-to-face collaboration is not to hinder long-socialized communication and interaction forms. By building interaction environments integrating ubiquitous computing facilities that adapt to the needs of the people working in them, we might enhance, augment, and facilitate natural interaction within face-to-face collaboration instead of forcing people to communicate and interact with dedicated computer systems. A key role for the success of these environments will be in how they are realized. To build office environments of the future it will not be sufficient to put traditional PCs everywhere and expect them to foster interaction and creativity among group workers. In contrast, collaborative environments that adapt to the needs of group workers would allow the computer as a device to disappear in the architecture of office spaces, while its functionality remains ubiquitously available [1, 2, 4]. The architecture of future collaborative environments includes buildings, rooms, room elements such as interactive tables, interactive displays set in walls, or chairs with integrated information technology. Their realization requires an integrated design of real and virtual parts that augment reality and thus combine the natural and intuitive interaction in the physical world with the benefits of an underlying computer infrastructure that disappears in the architecture and ideally only becomes salient " on demand ". In such a future environment, effective face-to-face collaboration will be possible [3].