PhoTable: Enhancing the Social Interaction around the Sharing of Digital Photographs

Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing piles of recently developed photos, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. We have developed a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, leveraging the digital technology allows us to capture the stories told, and associate them as metadata to the appropriate photographs. Thus, purely as a side-effect of the social interaction, we automatically create a digital photo album annotated with stories told about each photograph, and navigation possibilities derived from the storytelling session. ACM Classification