Around the Table

Tables are a familiar piece of furniture commonly found in homes, offices, cafés, design centers, show rooms, waiting areas, and entertainment centers. Tables provide a familiar and convenient physical setting for people to meet, chat, look over documents, and carry out tasks that require face-to-face collaboration. Digital documents, on the other hand, are commonly used only on desktop computers and handheld devices. Digital documents are much easier to share remotely than face-to-face, due to a lack of a physical media that contain the necessary computational support for face-to-face around the table applications. For the past two years, our group has studied, designed and built an initial prototype of a digitally augmented tabletop environment called DiamondSpin. Our objectives are to understand what are the new HCI mechanisms, UI metaphors and affordances that can enable fluid collaborative tabletop applications.