Evaluating an automatic rotation feature in collaborative tabletop workspaces

Tabletops are commonly used for collaboration but would benefit from features that help orient objects to individual users disposed around the display. We propose an approach of automatic orientation based on fingers and hand detection as a proxy to determine the position of the user. To contribute to the discussion of the relevance of automatic rotation, we present a comparison study of pairs of participants engaged in both loosely and tightly coupled tasks. We collected performance measures, questionnaires and analyze interactions from video recordings. The results show that automatic rotation is more suitable when the collaboration is loosely coupled. Conversely, in tightly coupled tasks performance are worse and user ratings low when automatic rotations are enabled. We conclude that features such as automatic orientation on tabletop are important and promising but that they need to be critically assessed with respect to their effects on collaboration in both tightly and loosely coupled tasks.