| Co-located ad hoc collaborative meetings are common. Often, the focus of the collaboration is around documents that the participants have brought in digital or physical form. However, current workspaces do not support the integration of physical and digital information in a shared collaborative context. Digital information is often stored on individual devices, which are difficult to share, and digital presentation facilities provide an unequal collaboration dynamic. Physical tables do not support digital content, and current digital tabletop applications ignore flexibility and ease of sharing content, major strengths of physical tables. For electronic tabletops to be useful, they must be able to support fluid integration with all types of content. I have developed applications to support collaboration on digital tabletops around various types of content, including paper documents, laptop computers, USB drives, non-table displays, mobile sensors, and fixed sensors. For each type of content, I have developed an end-to-end interaction model describing how the user connects information with the table and I have evaluated an example application where this model is used. In conjunction with several on-table interactions for manipulating and organizing information that I have developed, these new interaction models show how digital tabletops can be used as effective ad hoc collaborative displays. |
