Roberto Martínez Maldonado

Collaborative concept mapping at the tabletop

Concept mapping is a technique where users externalise their conceptual and propositional knowledge of a domain in a way that can be readily understood by others. It is widely used in education, so that a learners understanding is made available to their peers and to teachers. There is considerable potential educational benefit in collaborative concept mapping, and the tabletop is an ideal tool for this. This paper describes Cmate, a tabletop collaborative concept mapping system. We describe its design process and how this draws upon both the principles of concept mapping and on those for creating educational applications on tabletops.

Seamless and continuous user identification for interactive tabletops using personal device handshaking and body tracking

Touch-based tabletops are a form of embedded device for group collaboration. This work tackles two key problems for effective use of such tabletops: there is currently no easy way for people to identify themselves to the table; and most current hardware does not link a persons touches to their identity. This paper presents a system which tackles these problems as it can identify users and keeps track of their actions around interactive tabletops. To start the user identification, a user puts their personal device onto the interactive surface. Once this is paired with the tabletop, linking the device owners identity to the table, the system continuously tracks any touch by that user. The system seamlessly and continuously associates each user touch with an identity.