Adaptive personal territories for co-located tabletop interaction in a museum setting

In this paper, we address the problem of designing for participation and parallel interaction with a walk-up-and-use tabletop system in a public exhibition environment. Motivated by the work practice of territoriality, we implement a novel, tabletop-integrated multi-user tracking system that provides data on a user's location and movement. Based on this robust hardware and software implementation, we present an interaction design that assigns a visually separated display space to each user, the space serving them as a personal territory. These territories can serve as affordances for initiating interactions; most notably they can support the multi-user coordination process during parallel co-located information exploration, which has been observed in our preliminary evaluation.