Visual Scoping of Private Information Displayed on Shared Tabletop Surfaces

Informations sharing in meetings or conference calls are often done by displaying the information on a shared display, e.g. a projected or shared display, or a shared surface as a table. The amount of information on the shared surface may increase, and the clutter makes the relevant information hidden or hard to find. One challenge for current systems is to filter out the information without interest. Another challenge is adding information. For most current system, as information is added, it distracts the other participants as parts of the display is obstructed, or activity elsewhere on the display draws undesired activity. In this paper, we describe a novel system that fixes these challenges by filtering out unwanted information, or superimposing information that should not be displayed to everyone on a private display, thus providing a useful way of only working with the information of interest.