Controlling and Coordinating Computers in a Room with In-Room Gestures

To interact with a computer, a user can walk up to it and interact with it through its local interaction space defined by its input devices. With multiple computers in a room, the user can walk up to each computer and interact with it. However, this can be logistically impractical and forces the user to learn each computer’s local interaction space. Interaction involving multiple computers also becomes hard or even impossible to do. We propose to have a global interaction space letting users, through in-room gestures, select and issue commands to one or multiple computers in the room. A global interaction space has functionality to sense and record the state of a room, including location of computers, users, and gestures, and uses this to issue commands to each computer. A prototype has been implemented in a room with multiple computers and a high-resolution, wall-sized display. The global interaction space is used to issue commands, moving display output from on-demand selected computers to the large display and back again. It is also used to select multiple computers and concurrently execute commands on them.