Interface Currents

Uta Hinrichs
Stacey D. Scott
Sheelagh Carpendale

Supporting Co-located Collaborative Work

Large screen vertical and horizontal displays provide new opportunities to support individual and collaborative activities especially in terms of creativity and design tasks. The size of these displays introduces several unique opportunities such as co-located collaboration but at the same time issues for interface designers such as: potential difficulties of reaching workspace items far away from one's current position at the display, and the tendency of people to walk around when using a wall display or sit in various positions around a tabletop display. Thus, in contrast to traditional interfaces, large display interfaces need to support access to workspace items from a variety of positions at the display. In order to improve access to workspace items, providing better support for obtaining and sharing items and for mobility at the display which can be very important to improve creative processes, we propose a novel interaction metaphor, the so-called Interface Current, that allows interface components to play a more active role in the workspace activity.

A recent implementation is done using the Display Framework.

Images

Videos

Attach:InterfaceCurrents1.mp4

Download video (47.6 MB)

Publications

Hinrichs, Uta, Carpendale, Sheelagh and Scott, Stacey D. Evaluating the Effects of Fluid Interface Components on Tabletop Collaboration. In AVI '06: Advanced Visual Interfaces, pages 27-34, 2006.
Uta Hinrichs, Sheelagh Carpendale, Stacey D. Scott and Eric Pattison. Interface Currents: Supporting Fluent Collaboration on Tabletop Displays. In Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Smart Graphics. Springer Verlag, pages 185-197, 2005.
Uta Hinrichs, Sheelagh Carpendale and Stacey D. Scott. Interface Currents: Supporting Fluent Face-to-Face Collaboration. In Sketch Presentation at the 32th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interaction Techniques (SIGGRAPH). ACM Press, 2005.
Uta Hinrichs. Interface Currents: Evaluating a Fluid Interface for Tabletop Collaboration. Master's thesis, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany, 2005.
Uta Hinrichs, Sheelagh Carpendale and Stacey D. Scott. Interface Currents - Supporting Co-located Collaborative Work on Tabletop Displays. Research report 2005-773-04, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, 2005.