T 3 : Rapid Prototyping of High-Resolution Tabletop Applications

Multi-person tabletop applications that require a high display resolution, such as collaborative web-browsing and collaborative spreadsheets, are currently very difficult to create. As a consequence, there has been little investigation of important tabletop applications, despite promising early results. In this position paper we present T3, a software toolkit that addresses these challenges. T3 allows researchers to rapidly create highresolution multi-person tabletop applications for co-located collaborators. It uses multiple projectors to create a single seamless high-resolution tabletop display. Furthermore, it supports existing user interface components, including buttons, web-browsers and spreadsheets, allowing the rapid creation of complex tabletop applications. We show how we have used T3 to create five novel tabletop applications that would previously have been very difficult to build.