Suturing Space: Tabletop Portals for Collaboration

Most video-conferencing technologies focus on 1-1, person-to-person links, typically showing the heads and shoulders of the conversants seated facing their cameras. This limits their movement and expects foveal attention. Adding people to the conversation multiplies the complexity and competes for visual real estate and video bandwidth. Most coronal meaning-making activity is excised by this frontal framing of the participants. This method does not scale well as the number of participants rises. This research presents a different approach to augmenting collaboration and learning. Instead of projecting people to remote spaces, furniture is digitally augmented to effectively exist in two (or more) locations at once. An autoethnographic analysis of social protocols of this technology is presented. We ask, how can such shared objects provide a common site for ad hoc activity in concurrent conversations among people who are not co-located but co-present via audio?