Planificación de la acción preventiva SBC

The question how to support co-located collaboration around table systems is already answered in the real world: Information can be rotated and piled up physically very easy. Sharing can be facilitated by so-called lazy Susans known from Chinese restaurants. A lazy Susan is a rotatable, usually round plate made of wood or glass located in the middle of a table (see Figure 2.11). People sitting around the table can place items on it, for instance food or dishes. By rotating the lazy Susan these items can be passed easily

2.3 Interfaces Supporting Fluid Interaction and/or Collaboration

Figure 2.11:Lazy Susan in a Chinese restaurant.

between people. Some tabletop systems have adopted the principle of a lazy Susan in the broadest sense. These systems are described in the following.

Interactive Table

The Interactive Table [OPH+_{00] was developed in a cooperation between the Museum}

of Modern Art 4 _{(MoMA), New York and the MIT Media Laboratory}5_{. The MoMA was}

planning an exhibition that consisted of 26 architectural exhibits. Each of the exhibit was emphasized by lots of electronic information that is usually displayed by computers located apart from the exhibition. The design of the Interactive Table was motivated by the intention of integrating electronic information more into the exhibition and, further- more, to motivate visitors to interactively browse through this information and share

impressions with others [OPH+_00].

(a) Lazy Susan on the Interactive Table. (b) Top-projected displays on each place setting.

Figure 2.12:The Interactive Table at the MoMA [OPH+_00].

4 http://www.moma.org

Chapter 2 Related Work

The Interactive Table is a five-legged round dining table with a surface with eight feet at diameter. It provides space for eight people. For each of these place seatings a display is projected from above which is 14 inches by 18 inches (see Figure 2.12(b)). This space acts as a “personal territory”, as described in Section 2.2.4. In the middle of the Interactive Table a five-foot-diameter lazy Susan is placed that has 26 holes on its outer edge. In each of these holes one coaster is located that represents one of each exhibits in the showroom (see Figure 2.12(a)). In middle of the lazy Susan a display is projected as well. In order to get information about a specific exhibit, the user has to place the corresponding coaster from the lazy Susan to a certain position in the displayed workspace in front of her. An interface appears that allows the user to choose the desired information. This information including text, images, and animations is then displayed. Visitors that browse through information on the Interactive Table have the possibility to share such information with others. To do that, the user can send certain images to the center of the lazy Susan, the “group territory” of the table. First, the image will be oriented to the person who has send it, but by rotating the lazy Susan physically the image would be rotated, as well, which makes it possible for others to see it in an

appropriate angle [OPH+_00].

The concept of the Interactive Table shows a possibility of using a physical lazy Susan in order to facilitate sharing of information in electronic (certain information about the exhibits) and physical (coasters representing those information) form. A lazy Susan can ease the orientation problem and act as a public space or group territory, respectively, at the same time. Furthermore, people use it intuitively since they know the principle from the real world. The systems described in the next section use the principle of a lazy Susan as well but in an electronic way.

UbiTable, Personal Digital Historian, and Poetry Table

The UbiTable [SER03], the Personal Digital Historian (PDH) [SLV03], and the Poetry- Table [RFSM04] were all developed by the Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratory

(MERL)6_{(see Figure 2.13).}

For all of these systems the DiamondTouch [DL01], a touch sensitive display that sup- ports simultaneous user interaction, was used. The implementation of the interfaces was based on the DiamondSpin toolkit [SLV03]. The DiamondSpin toolkit facilitates rapid prototyping of interfaces for interactive shared displays. It provides functionality concerning visual document management, document control and interaction, manipu- lation of items by hand or styli, multi-user support and, particularly, management of personal and public spaces and orientation of interface components [SLV03]. The com- mon ground of UbiTable, PDH and Poetry table is that they provide a public space in the middle of the workspace. Information items are oriented to the edges of the digital table to provide sharing.

2.3 Interfaces Supporting Fluid Interaction and/or Collaboration

(a) UbiTable [SER03]. (b) PoetryTable [RFSM04]. (c) Personal Digital Histo- rian [SLV03].

Figure 2.13:Tabletop systems built by MERL.

(a) UbiTable—personal and group

spaces [SER03]. (b) PDH—rotatablegroup space [SLV03].

Figure 2.14:Group spaces on the UbiTable and the PDH.

UbiTable

The UbiTable [SER03] allows people to connect portable devices such as laptops or USB-devices with it in order to exchange or transfer documents easily. In this way, the UbiTable supports a private area in form of the laptop. Passersby cannot see information that a user wants to keep private without coming very close. Furthermore, the interface of the UbiTable provides a personal (semi private) space in front of each user and a pub- lic space in the middle of the table. All collaborators at the digital table have access to information in the public space. This space acts like a group territory as described in Sec- tion 2.2.4. The public space reminds of a physical lazy Susan, because it is circular and all information items are oriented towards the edges of the table (see Figure 2.14(a)).

However, as far as SHEN et al. [SER03] describe the public space, it is not rotatable.

This would be useful, in particular if the application is used on a larger table, where people cannot reach everything in the public space that easy. In addition, the public and personal space have a fixed size. Because the amount of items in the personal or group space can increase during collaboration this could cause problems.

Chapter 2 Related Work

PoetryTable

The PoetryTable was developed for an educational game inspired by “magnetic poetry”7

where people can construct little stories or poems by combining word tiles. Similar to

the UbiTable, the setup of the PoetryTable described by RYALL et al. [RFSM04] consists

of a large circular group space in the middle of the table where word tiles are spread out. Each word tile is oriented to the outside of the group space. Pop-up menus allow users to duplicate or to change the prefix or suffix of a word. A user study where groups of peo- ple had to reconstruct given poems with the word tiles showed that in particular groups of more than two members often worked in parallel by dividing up the task. The Poet- ryTable, in contrast to the UbiTable, does not support personal spaces which can cause problems when people are doing more complicated tasks involving more resources. Fur- thermore, as already stated in the last paragraph, it would be useful to have a rotatable group space to facilitate the sharing of resources.

Personal Digital Historian (PDH)

The PDH [SLV03] supports “interactive informal storytelling” for multiple users. Most of

the tabletop space is used for a large circular public space called thestory-space. In the

story-space, photographs and images that the users want to share are spread out. All images are oriented to the outside of the circular space similar as on the PoetryTable de- scribed above. They can be oriented manually, as well (see Figure 2.14(b)). Furthermore, the whole story-space can be rotated such as a lazy Susan [SLV03]. The story space is surrounded by a rim where arched control panels are located. The control panels can be used to display certain content in the middle of the workspace. They are repositionable along the perimeter of the workspace and, depending on the number of users collaborat- ing, the number of panels can be increased in order to provide each user with an own control panel. A stream of moving pictures can be optionally projected on unused spaces of the perimeter of the digital table [SLV03]. These pictures can relate to other pictures in the story-space. They can also be explored in greater detail if desired.

The PDH is suitable for tasks that require very close collaboration. Due to the setup of the workspace it does foster working in parallel because it does not provide personal spaces. The whole workspace is more or less a public space. Thus, the PDH does not sup- port a large variety of collaborative tasks but only very specific ones. However, sharing information benefits from the fact that the whole story-space is rotatable.

These three tabletop systems show how the orientation problem can be solved in the public workspace of a tabletop display. In particular the rotatable public space on the PDH provides an easy way to give all people working on the digital table the same access to information. An interesting part of the PDH is the option to have a stream of pictures. The design of the Café Table, described in the following section, focuses more on this idea of streaming information.

2.3 Interfaces Supporting Fluid Interaction and/or Collaboration