Abstract:

Multi-user, interactive tabletops are an exciting new form factor to support collaborative group activities. To date, much of the research in this area has focused on co-located collaboration -- groups of people seated around the same physical table. A natural step is to connect a co-located group working around a table to other remote sites, creating a shared collaborative environment. In this paper we present RemoteDT, and initial prototype to explore the space of multi-site table collaboration. Our system was designed to exploit DiamondTouch [2], a multi-user, multi-technology, but could utilize any table hardware that provides the same capabilities. RemoteDT provides three modes of interacting with the table (manipulation, annotation, and telepointers), as well as support for connecting to remote tables or single-user devices. We believe our initial exploration of the space will serve as a good starting point for future exploration by ourselves and others.