Study on generic tangible objects used to collaborate remotely on RFID tabletops

Having the tools to work remotely with other people is one of the ambitions of people who work in a group context. In fact they have to move and to link their team-work in order to collaborate on one or several tasks. This paper describes a study on an innovative system designed to support remote collaborative applications on tabletops with tangible interaction. We propose a set of generic tangible objects. They model a set of collaborative styles which are possible between tabletop users. Our goal is to study the usability of and satisfaction with such objects that provide remote collaboration among users of interactive tabletops for tangible interaction. An application adapted to remote collaboration was tested in the laboratory with adult participants. Twelve test groups, each composed of three participants, tested a distributed application for the learning and recognition of colors. Our analysis, supported by observations, log file analysis and questionnaires, focuses on whether the use of generic objects to collaborate remotely is easy and understandable for users. It also considers user satisfaction when using the distributed tabletop with tangible objects.

[1]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  Distributed UI on Interactive Tabletops: Issues and Context Model , 2013, Distributed User Interfaces.

[2]  Peter Robinson,et al.  Territorial coordination and workspace awareness in remote tabletop collaboration , 2009, CHI.

[3]  Hideaki Kuzuoka,et al.  Improving visibility of remote gestures in distributed tabletop collaboration , 2011, CSCW '11.

[4]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  RFID-driven situation awareness on TangiSense, a table interacting with tangible objects , 2011, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[5]  Alan Esenther,et al.  RemoteDT: Support for Multi-Site Table Collaboration , 2006 .

[6]  Shahram Izadi,et al.  3D-board: a whole-body remote collaborative whiteboard , 2014, UIST.

[7]  Jean-Bernard Martens,et al.  Read-It: five-to-seven-year-old children learn to read in a tabletop environment , 2004, IDC '04.

[8]  Shai Linn,et al.  Mediated telemedicine vs. face-to-face medicine: efficiency in distress reduction , 2015, Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces.

[9]  Pierre Dillenbourg,et al.  An integrated way of using a tangible user interface in a classroom , 2015, Int. J. Comput. Support. Collab. Learn..

[10]  Judith S. Olson,et al.  Distance Matters , 2000, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[11]  M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale,et al.  Collaborative coupling over tabletop displays , 2006, CHI.

[12]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  RFID interactive tabletop application with tangible objects: exploratory study to observe young children’ behaviors , 2015, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[13]  Jérémie Melchior.  Distributed user interfaces in space and time , 2011, EICS '11.

[14]  Kenneth P. Fishkin,et al.  A taxonomy for and analysis of tangible interfaces , 2004, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[15]  Jie Liu,et al.  uEmergency: a collaborative system for emergency management on very large tabletop , 2012, ITS '12.

[16]  Mohamed Ali Feki,et al.  The role of affordances and interaction bits in the design of a new tangible programming interface: A preliminary result , 2013, Bell Labs Technical Journal.

[17]  Yuichi Ohta,et al.  Face-to-Face Tabletop Remote Collaboration in Mixed Reality , 2007, 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.

[18]  Markus Rittenbruch.  Supporting Collaboration on Very Large-Scale Interactive Wall Surfaces , 2015, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[19]  Victoria Bellotti,et al.  Walking away from the desktop computer: distributed collaboration and mobility in a product design team , 1996, CSCW '96.

[20]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  From Centralized Interactive Tabletops to Distributed Surfaces: The Tangiget Concept , 2012, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[21]  Ali Mazalek,et al.  SciSketch: a tabletop collaborative sketching system , 2014, TEI '14.

[22]  Patrick Olivier,et al.  Tables in the wild: lessons learned from a large-scale multi-tabletop deployment , 2013, CHI.

[23]  Sébastien Kubicki,et al.  Distributed User Interfaces: Usability and Collaboration , 2013, Human–Computer Interaction Series.

[24]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  An exploratory study of co-located collaborative visual analytics around a tabletop display , 2010, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology.

[25]  Judy Kay,et al.  Deploying and Visualising Teacher’s Scripts of Small Group Activities in a Multi-surface Classroom Ecology: a Study in-the-wild , 2015, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[26]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  WeSearch: supporting collaborative search and sensemaking on a tabletop display , 2010, CSCW '10.

[27]  Sylvain Haudegond,et al.  A Design Model for Tangible Interaction: Case Study in Waste Sorting , 2016 .

[28]  Alan F. Smeaton,et al.  Collaborative video searching on a tabletop , 2007, Multimedia Systems.

[29]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  Distributed Tabletops: Study Involving Two RFID Tabletops with Generic Tangible Objects , 2016, ICWE Workshops.

[30]  Hiroshi Ishii,et al.  Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms , 1997, CHI.

[31]  Ronald Poppe,et al.  Automatic behavior analysis in tag games: from traditional spaces to interactive playgrounds , 2016, Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces.

[32]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  Context-sensitive and Collaborative application for Distributed User Interfaces on tabletops , 2014, DUI '14.

[33]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  Management of Distributed RFID Surfaces: A Cooking Assistant for Ambient Computing in Kitchen , 2014, ANT/SEIT.

[34]  Christophe Kolski,et al.  New Human-Computer Interactions Using Tangible Objects: Application on a Digital Tabletop with RFID Technology , 2009, HCI.

[35]  Holger Regenbrecht,et al.  Carpeno: interfacing remote collaborative virtual environments with table-top interaction , 2006, Virtual Reality.