Kathleen Ryall

UbiTable: Impromptu Face-to-Face Collaboration on Horizontal Interactive Surfaces

Despite the mobility enabled by the plethora of technological tools such as laptops, PDA and cell phones, horizontal flat surfaces are still extensively used and much preferred for on-the-move face-to-face collaboration. Unfortunately, when digital documents need to be shared during collaboration, people are still mostly constrained to display surfaces that have been designed for single users, such as laptops and PDAs. Technologically there is a lack of computational support for shared digital document access, browsing, visualization and manipulation on horizontal surfaces. We believe support for such serendipitous meetings will play a critical role in future ubiquitous computing spaces. Our UbiTable project examines the design space of tabletops used as scrap displays. Scrap displays support kiosk-style walk-up interaction for impromptu face-to-face collaboration. Our design offers the affordances of a physical table. It provides the flexibility by allowing users to layout shared documents with desired orientation and position; at the same time it augments traditional paper-based interactions by providing a flexible gradient or shades of sharing semantics. UbiTable addresses visual accessibility vs. electronic accessibility of documents, an issue which is critical to ubiquitous environments.