Summary Table‐centric multisurface environments (T‐MSEs) that combine small multitouch surfaces (eg, smartphones and tablets) with large interactive tabletops provide people with both personal and shared workspaces to support various independent and collective tasks during group activities. This paper reports on the third in a series of studies exploring how existing interaction methods for cross‐device transfer, such as the Pick‐and‐Drop (P&D) method, can be adapted to table‐centric multisurface environment settings. The study examined the use of device‐specific visual feedback to improve users' awareness of transferred content during P&D transfer. The tabletop feedback utilized the existing Surface Ghosts P&D feedback approach (ie, “ghosted” versions of transferred content were displayed in real time under the user's hand). The tablet feedback consisted of a static “Tablet Bridge ” feedback showing miniature versions of transferred content along the top edge of the tablet interface. The study found that providing both types of feedback significantly improved users' transfer awareness over providing Surface Ghosts feedback alone. It also revealed that the Tablet Bridge feedback helped compensate for technical and usability issues associated with the Surface Ghosts feedback design. Lessons learned from our combined series of cross‐device transfer studies are reflected upon, and relevant design implications are discussed.

Combining large interactive surface computers (e.g., digital walls and tables) with smaller, multi-touch surface devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) provides groups of users with both private and shared workspaces during collaborative (or competitive) activities. Such multi-surface environments introduce the need for effective interaction techniques that enable the transfer of digital content from one device to another, commonly known as cross-device transfer. Utilizing popular existing cross-transfer methods, such as Pick-and-Drop, in a multi-user multi-surface environment, however, require systems that can distinguish between users in order for the environment to accurately know who is transferring what content to what device. Yet, most commercially available digital tabletop systems are not capable of distinguishing between different users. Therefore, existing cross-device transfer methods must be adapted to work in such a user-information limited context. This paper presents a user study comparing the effectiveness of two adapted transfer methods in the context of a strategic digital tabletop card game task. The two transfer methods included a virtual portals-style method, called Bridges, and an adapted Pick-and-Drop method (A-PND). The studied transfer methods both supported the high-levels of card-transfer between private (tablet) and tabletop surfaces required by the game task. Also, participants' reported preferences were equally divided between the two techniques. An in-depth qualitative analysis of the study data revealed that each transfer method provided unique advantages and disadvantages for the game task, which aligned better or worse with different players' personal task goals.

Rekimoto's Pick-and-Drop (P&D) transfer technique is commonly used to support multi-surface object transfer (e.g., between a shared tabletop and tablet) due to its easily understood metaphor of emulating object movement in the physical world. Current multi-surface implementations of P&D provide little to no feedback during transfer, causing confusion for the person performing the action as well as others in the environment. To address this issue, we investigated the use of virtual embodiments to improve awareness of transferred objects, in the context of a real-world group task that relied heavily on cross-device transfer. An iterative design process led to the design of Surface Ghosts virtual embodiments, which take the form of semi-transparent 'ghosts' of the transferred objects displayed under the "owner's" hand on the tabletop during transfer. A user study that compared two Surface Ghosts designs-varied by how explicitly the "owner" was indicated-showed that both designs improved awareness of transferred objects when compared to a no-feedback control condition, especially for tabletop-to-tablet transfers.

Rekimoto's Pick-and-Drop (PND) cross-device transfer technique is commonly used to support multi-surface object transfer, for instance, between a multi-touch tabletop and tablet, due to its easily understood metaphor that emulates object movement in the physical world. Current multi-surface implementations of PND provide little to no feedback during the transfer process, creating confusion during transfer. This paper investigates two visual feedback techniques, Object Shadow (OS) and Object-plus-Arm Shadow (O+AS), designed to address this issue by visually representing the transferred object and its "owning" user during the transfer process.

The increasing trend toward multi-device ecologies that provide private and shared digital surfaces introduces a need for effective cross-device object transfer interaction mechanisms. This work-in-progress paper investigates visual feedback techniques for enhancing the usability of the Pick-and-Drop cross-device object transfer technique when used between a shared digital table and private tablets. We propose two visual feedback designs aimed to improve awareness of virtual objects during a Pick-and-Drop transfer. Initial results from a comparative user study are presented and discussed, along with directions for future work.

This work-in-progress paper describes the design of an interaction technique that addresses user interaction challenges with digital object transfer between private and shared surfaces, particularly in co-located group settings. We propose a transfer technique for bridging tablets and digital tables that builds on existing interaction techniques, such as virtual embodiments and multi-display bridging techniques, to improve awareness of the transfer process both for the person performing the transfer and for their collaborators. The technique also minimizes effort involved in the transfer action, enabling people to focus on the activity at hand--or the ongoing conversation--rather than on the technologies being used.

This paper examines some aspects of the usefulness of interactive tabletop systems, if and how these impact collaboration. We chose creative problem solving such as brainstorming as an application framework to test several collaborative media: the use of pen-and-paper tools, the “around-the-table” form factor, the digital tabletop interface, the attractiveness of interaction styles. Eighty subjects in total (20 groups of four members) participated in the experiments. The evaluation criteria were task performance, collaboration patterns (especially equity of contributions), and users’ subjective experience. The “around-the-table” form factor, which is hypothesized to promote social comparison, increased performance and improved collaboration through an increase of equity. Moreover, the attractiveness of the tabletop device improved subjective experience and increased motivation to engage in the task. However, designing attractiveness seems a highly challenging issue, since overly attractive interfaces may distract users from the task.

In this paper, we present Tablexcel, a tabletop interface to Microsoft Excel. Single-user, desktop-based computer applications are pervasive in our daily lives and work. An application like Microsoft Excel, a widely deployed spreadsheet application, is used by a large number of businesses and users. Often, several users will collaborate on the creation of a spreadsheet, for example exchanging Excel files by e-mail. A multi-user, multi-touch interactive tabletop could create better working conditions, but Excel is not compatible with tabletop interfaces. Tablexcel use the scripting capabilities of Excel to extract live data from Excel files, and display them in a tabletop-appropriate way. Multiple users can interact with the Tablexcel interface using tabletop interactions, like gestures or rotating windows. Tablexcel manage the collaborative aspect of the interaction and send the resulting modifications to the original Excel application, which update the formulas, graphs, macros, etc.

Single-user, desktop-based computer applications are pervasive in our daily lives and work. The prospect of using these applications with innovative interaction systems, like multi-touch tabletops, tangible user interfaces, large displays or public/private displays, would enable large scale field studies of these technologies, and has the potential to significantly improve their usefulness and, in turn, their availability. This paper focuses on the architectural requirements, design, and implementation of such a technology. First, we review various software technologies for using a single-user desktop application with a different model of user inputs and graphical output. We then present a generic technique for using any closed-source or open-source application with different input and output devices. In our approach, the application is separated from the user input and graphical output subsystem. The core part of the application runs in a system-specific virtual environment. This virtual environment exposes the same API as the removed standard subsystems. This eliminates the need to rewrite the "legacy" application and provides high performances by using the application native way to communicate with the system.

Single-user, desktop-based computer applications are pervasive in our daily lives and work. The prospect of using these applications with innovative interaction systems, like multi-touch tabletops, tangible user interfaces, large displays or public/private displays, would enable large scale field studies of these technologies, and has the potential to significantly improve their usefulness and, in turn, their availability. This paper focuses on the architectural requirements, design, and implementation of such a technology. First, we review various software technologies for using a single-user desktop application with a different model of user inputs and graphical output. We then present a generic technique for using any closed-source or open-source application with different input and output devices. In our approach, the application is separated from the user input and graphical output subsystem. The core part of the application runs in a system-specific virtual environment. This virtual environment exposes the same API as the removed standard subsystems. This eliminates the need to rewrite the "legacy" application and provides high performances by using the application native way to communicate with the system.

This paper describes a software component and several interaction techniques enabling existing non-modified desktop applications to be used by several users on a tabletop system. We describe our software implementation, design to redirect X Window applications to tabletop using the Metisse server and the DiamondSpin toolkit. We then present some co-located collaborative work problems, and suggest several interaction techniques that can be used to allow collaborative use of these single-user single-pointer applications.

The aim of this paper is to explore new metaphors for interaction design on tabletop system. Tabletop systems are shared horizontal surface for co-located collaboration, which leads to original problems when designing interactions. We propose two metaphors based on the paper: the peeling metaphor, and the slot metaphor, and then suggest a way of using them to design new interactions for solving some of the problems of tabletop systems: documents organization, documents transmission and documents duplication.

The aim of this study is to investigate the usability and usefulness of interactive tabletop technologies to support group creativity. We implemented a tabletop interface enabling groups of 4 participants to build mind-maps (a tool for associative thinking). With 24 users in a within-group design, we compared its use to traditional paper-and-pencil mind-mapping sessions. The results showed no difference in idea production, but the tabletop condition significantly improved both subjective and collaborative dimensions, especially by leading to better-balanced contributions from the group members.