Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces

This article presents a video-based field study of the Reactable, a tabletop tangible user interface (TUI) for music performance, in a hands-on science centre. The goal was to investigate visitors’ social interactions in a public setting. We describe liminality and cross-group interaction, both synchronous with fluid transitions and overlaps in use between groups and asynchronous. Our findings indicate the importance of: (i) facilitating smooth transitions and overlaps between groups and (ii) supporting not only synchronous but also asynchronous group interaction. We discuss the lessons learned on how best to enable liminal situations in the design of interactive tabletops and TUIs for social interaction and particularly collaborative tangible music in public museum settings.

Presentation of a video-based field study describing cross-group interaction.

Description of exemplar vignettes of video for illustrating liminal situations in social interaction.

Discussion of the nature of different levels of cross-group interaction and their relevance for social interaction and collaboration.

Lessons learned in how best to enable liminal situations in the design of collaborative tangible user interfaces for promoting social interaction and collaboration.

Thermal cameras have recently drawn the attention of HCI researchers as a new sensory system enabling novel interactive systems. They are robust to illumination changes and make it easy to separate human bodies from the image background. Far-infrared radiation, however, has another characteristic that distinguishes thermal cameras from their RGB or depth counterparts, namely thermal reflection. Common surfaces reflect thermal radiation differently than visual light and can be perfect thermal mirrors. In this paper, we show that through thermal reflection, thermal cameras can sense the space beyond their direct field-of-view. A thermal camera can sense areas besides and even behind its field-of-view through thermal reflection. We investigate how thermal reflection can increase the interaction space of projected surfaces using camera-projection systems. We moreover discuss the reflection characteristics of common surfaces in our vicinity in both the visual and thermal radiation bands. Using a proof-of-concept prototype, we demonstrate the increased interaction space for hand-held camera-projection system. Furthermore, we depict a number of promising application examples that can benefit from the thermal reflection characteristics of surfaces.

This paper is concerned with how the spatial distribution of written informings in a serious game activity at an interactive tabletop (ITT) induces participants to read aloud interactionally relevant information to each other in the process of co-constructing a shared understanding. Engaging in an unfamiliar game activity, the participants are all equally dependent on written informings from the interface that serve as a game manual and provide crucial information for jointly achieving the game task(s). When it comes to making use of these written informings, we find the participants to read them aloud, making them accountable within the group. Our findings from multimodal video analysis of two reading-aloud cases suggest that the written informing's directionality and distribution (here, either designed as 'distributed' or 'shared' among the interface) regulate the partici-pants' access to information. And that participants who cannot visually access the information they are interested in reading (aloud) co-organize fine-grained joint successive actions build on and actualized by read-aloud utterances. These joint actions allow them to align their orientation and share their understanding of game activity-relevant content.

Constructive collaboration can be a difficult matter. For this reason, we are implementing and studying an interactive-tabletop-mediated activity that aims at inducing collaboration among participants. The resulting activity ‘Orbitia’ is designed as a serious game. Participants are asked to act as a space- mining crew, which has to collect minerals with a rover and rely on a camera- drone for reconnaissance, while keeping the rover out of harm and managing limited resources. In this paper we provide an account of how we designed Orbitia’s pedagogical structuring by relying on the Johnsons’ cooperative learning approach whose fundamental concept is “positive interdependence”. More particularly, we show how we worked on resource, role and task inter- dependence to design three collaboration-inducing ‘flagship’ devices: the rover- steering-device (RSD), the item-locating-device (ILD) and the responsibility- activating-device (RAD).

The development of FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) technology has enabled the construction of large-scale, low-cost, multi-touch displays. These displays—capable of sensing fingers, hands, and whole arms—have great potential for exploring complex data in a natural manner and easily scale in size and the number of simultaneous users. In this context, access and security problems arise if a larger team operates the surface with different access rights. The team members might have different levels of authority or specific roles, which determines what functions they are allowed to access via the multi-touch surface. In this paper we present first concepts and strategies to use a mobile phone to spontaneously authenticate and interact with sub-regions of a large-scale multi-touch wall.

In this workshop, we will review and discuss open issues , technical challenges and conceptual models for multi-device spatial or proxemic interaction. We aim to bring together researchers, students and practitioners working on technical infrastructures, studies and designs of spatial interfaces, or domain specific multi-device applications that use space as a unit of analysis. We focus specifically on analysing how such interfaces, tools and tracking technology can be deployed " in the wild ". The workshop will facilitate knowledge exchange about the current state of spatial and proxemic interactive systems, identify application domains and enabling technologies for cross-surface interactions in the wild, and establish a research community to develop effective strategies for successful design of cross-device interactions .

We present HapTable; a multi-modal interactive tabletop that allows users to interact with digital images and objects through natural touch gestures, and receive visual and haptic feedback accordingly. In our system, hand pose is registered by an infrared camera and hand gestures are classified using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. To display a rich set of haptic effects for both static and dynamic gestures, we integrated electromechanical and electrostatic actuation techniques effectively on tabletop surface of HapTable, which is a surface capacitive touch screen. We attached four piezo patches to the edges of tabletop to display vibrotactile feedback for static gestures. For this purpose, the vibration response of the tabletop, in the form of frequency response functions (FRFs), was obtained by a laser Doppler vibrometer for 84 grid points on its surface. Using these FRFs, it is possible to display localized vibrotactile feedback on the surface for static gestures. For dynamic gestures, we utilize the electrostatic actuation technique to modulate the frictional forces between finger skin and tabletop surface by applying voltage to its conductive layer. To our knowledge, this hybrid haptic technology is one of a kind and has not been implemented or tested on a tabletop. It opens up new avenues for gesture-based haptic interaction not only on tabletop surfaces but also on touch surfaces used in mobile devices with potential applications in data visualization, user interfaces, games, entertainment, and education. Here, we present two examples of such applications, one for static and one for dynamic gestures, along with detailed user studies. In the first one, user detects the direction of a virtual flow, such as that of wind or water, by putting their hand on the tabletop surface and feeling a vibrotactile stimulus traveling underneath it. In the second example, user rotates a virtual knob on the tabletop surface to select an item from a menu while feeling the knob's detents and resistance to rotation in the form of frictional haptic feedback.

The exploitation of finger and hand tracking technology based on infrared light, such as FTIR, Diffused Illumination (DI) or Diffused Surface Illumination (DSI) has enabled the construction of large-scale, low-cost, interactive multi-touch surfaces. In this context, access and security problems arise if larger teams operate theses surfaces with different access rights. The team members might have several levels of authority or specific roles, which determine what functions and objects they are allowed to access via the multi-touch surface. In this paper we present first concepts and strategies to authenticate and interact with sub-regions of a large-scale multi-touch wall.

Co-located tabletop tangible user interfaces (TUIs) for music performance are known for promoting multi-player collaboration with a shared interface, yet it is still unclear how to best support the awareness of the workspace in terms of understanding individual actions and the other group members actions, in parallel. In this paper, we investigate the effects of providing auditory feedback using ambisonics spatialisation, aimed at informing users about the location of the tangibles on the tabletop surface, with groups of mixed musical backgrounds. Participants were asked to improvise music on "SoundXY4: The Art of Noise", a tabletop system that includes sound samples inspired by Russolo's taxonomy of noises. We compared spatialisation vs. nospatialisation conditions, and findings suggest that, when using spatialisation, there was a clearer workspace awareness, and a greater engagement in the musical activity as an immersive experience.

We investigate how the interaction with tangible interactive tabletops can be seen as a material exploration of form and sound. As the theoretical foundation for our analysis we build on John Dewey’s pragmatism as well as recent efforts to appropriate pragmatism for interaction design research.  As the research platform for this investigation we developed an interactive tabletop, the Radar Table, which allows users to create soundscapes by manipulating tangible objects. The Radar Table was deployed ‘in the wild’ at a major Danish music festival, and based on video recordings we examine people’s dynamic exploration of sound through the interactive tabletop. The main contribution of the paper is the development of the theoretical foundation for understanding tangible tabletops as material interfaces that can be shaped and experimented with.  We build on three of the basic concepts of pragmatism: situation, inquiry, and technology, which we develop further for the study of the dynamics of material interactions with tangible tabletops as part of a research strategy of appropriating pragmatism for use in interaction design and HCI research.

Social Media has become an integral part of our society that is no longer limited to private exchange and contacts but has also grown into business and commercial application and even culture and learning. Nevertheless, the representation of information is a crucial part and is currently dominated by chronological representations that can be found in Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the like. Although these interfaces are usually offering dedicated filtering mechanisms and sorting, there is a potential for using information from social media platforms in various contexts that have different requirements than a chronological order, such as reviewing posts about social events (e.g. concerts, museum exhibitions or festivals) which can be distributed over a longer period. In this paper we present a prototype and some use case examples of a search term based, multiuser enabled visualisation of twitter postings.

To support collaboration, researchers from different fields have proposed the design principles of shareability (engaging users in shared interactions around the same content) and positive interdependence (distributing roles and information to make users dependent on each other). While, on its own, each principle was shown to successfully support collaboration in different contexts, these principles are also partially conflicting, and their combination creates several design challenges. is paper describes how shareability and positive interdependency were jointly implemented in an interactive tabletop-mediated environment called Orbitia, with the aim of inducing collaboration between three adult participants. We present the design details and rationale behind the proposed application. Furthermore, we describe the results of an empirical evaluation focusing on joint problem-solving efficiency, collaboration styles, participation equity, and perceived collaboration effectiveness.