Experiences with and observations of direct-touch tabletops

The design of multitouch multiuser tabletop user interfaces is still in its infancy and is not yet well understood. To date, published experimental results have primarily focused on controlled user studies. In this paper, we present observations of user experience "in the wild" on interactive tables in four different real world contexts - all noncontrolled settings. We reflect upon our collective experience, report our observations, and summarize lessons learned by identifying design considerations relating to several aspects of interactive tables, such as simultaneous touching, ambiguous input, one-fingered touch, finger resolution, alternate touch input, crowding and clutter, text input, orientation, multiuser coordination, occlusion, ergonomic issues, and mental models.

[1]  E. Hall,et al.  The Hidden Dimension , 1970 .

[2]  Dan Morris,et al.  Individual audio channels with single display groupware: effects on communication and task strategy , 2004, CSCW.

[3]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Release, relocate, reorient, resize: fluid techniques for document sharing on multi-user interactive tables , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[4]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Beyond "social protocols": multi-user coordination policies for co-located groupware , 2004, CSCW.

[5]  Frédéric Vernier,et al.  Visualization techniques for circular tabletop interfaces , 2002, AVI '02.

[6]  Darren Leigh,et al.  DiamondTouch: a multi-user touch technology , 2001, UIST '01.

[7]  Morten Fjeld,et al.  Proceedings First IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems , 2006 .

[8]  M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale,et al.  How people use orientation on tables: comprehension, coordination and communication , 2003, GROUP '03.

[9]  M. Sheelagh T. Carpendale,et al.  Territoriality in collaborative tabletop workspaces , 2004, CSCW.

[10]  Desney S. Tan,et al.  With similar visual angles, larger displays improve spatial performance , 2003, CHI '03.

[11]  Clifton Forlines,et al.  DTLens: multi-user tabletop spatial data exploration , 2005, UIST.

[12]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Fluid interaction with high-resolution wall-size displays , 2001, UIST '01.

[13]  Tina Blaine,et al.  Jam-O-World: evolution of the Jam-O-Drum multi-player musical controller into the Jam-O-Whirl gaming interface , 2002 .

[14]  Takeshi Naemura,et al.  Lumisight table: a face-to-face collaboration support system that optimizes direction of projected information to each stakeholder , 2004, CSCW.

[15]  James H. Aylor,et al.  Computer for the 21st Century , 1999, Computer.

[16]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  DiamondSpin: an extensible toolkit for around-the-table interaction , 2004, CHI.

[17]  Mike Wu,et al.  Multi-finger and whole hand gestural interaction techniques for multi-user tabletop displays , 2003, UIST '03.

[18]  Daniel Vogel,et al.  Interactive public ambient displays: transitioning from implicit to explicit, public to personal, interaction with multiple users , 2004, UIST '04.

[19]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Exploring the effects of group size and table size on interactions with tabletop shared-display groupware , 2004, CSCW.