Hello again from Amsterdam! This is the third post in a mutliple-post series regarding my trip to the IEEE Tabletop 2008 Conference. If you’d like, check the IEEE Tabletops Conference tag listing to view the other posts in this series.

Today was the second day of the conference, and by far the most packed. The day began with an interesting keynote from Myron Krueger, both an artist and scientist who has been working with the idea of unique and alternative interfaces to computing since the 1960’s. It was amazing to see some of the things that Myron and his team were doing back when most people didn’t even know what a computer really was. We viewed tapes of old demonstrations and installations that his team created in the 70’s and 80’s, and included optical tracking of fingers, basic video conferencing from different locations, and even the idea of an interactive desktop surface nearly 3 decades before the technology was available to realize the concept. Much of the techniques that are present in modern-day interaction theory were inspired by his early work, and it was fascinating to hear his ideas and perspective on the current state of the technology. I wouldn’t even say it was a case of surprise that we have devices like the Microsoft Surface — it was more a case of “about time.”

After the keynote, we had three paper sessions consisting of 3 - 4 paper presentations each. The first session looked at the different interaction techniques present in typical tabletop applications. For example, one presentation discussed the concept of each object in the application having a “shared area”, which would be useful for interaction between the objects. The example they used involved sharing files between cellular phones placed onto the tabletop. They also presented an interesting, dynamic way for tracking the phones, using fiducials (like barcodes), only displayed on the screen of the phone itself, instead of on paper attached to the body of the phone, which is what has typically been the case. Another presentation involved the way that handoffs might occur between two users on the table. Their interaction scheme involved having the “sending” user bring the object close to a place where the “receiving” user is currently touching. As the sending user brought the object close, it increased in size, as a prompt to the receiving user. If the receiving user made a gesture toward the object, as if to take it, the object would then float from the touch of the sending user to that of the receiving user. A very nice idea to help solve the idea of sharing objects in a shared workspace.

The second session dealt with the design of the tabletop itself. There were presentations on research studies showing that multi-touch surfaces increase use participation in a group setting by leaps and bounds over single-mouse or single-touch interfaces. Not only were users more apt to jump right in and use the software, but the users also felt that the activity was less dominated by a single person. The first session also contained an interesting talk on the way that users work with objects on the tabletop surface itself. They had done an experiment using what they called “TableTrays”, a unique way of grouping tools and objects into a sort of sub-table, which allowed you to cut, copy, paste, and resize, for example, several pictures at once, instead of working with them individually. The interface certainly seemed like it would be quite useful for software which featured highly complex sets of tools, or many, many objects, which the user might want to manipulate at once, instead of only individually.

The third session dealt with actual software that was developed and used for specific purposes in a vareity of settings. One presentation showed off an application which allowed you to paint using a paint brush just as if the tabletop surface were a real canvas. The results were spectacular, and real artists created some very real art using the system. This table also featured a unique setup utilizing two different wavelengths of IR light to track both fingers and the brushes separately, allowing for some rather complicated interactions with the software. Another presentation presented a unique way of demonstrating the use of the multi-touch tabletop to beginners using what they called “TouchGhosts”, little animated guides showing first-hand how to interact with the objects on the table. This is something that our team has discussed in the past as a possibility for our own applications, so I was glad to see positive results from the presented study. Finally, the last paper presentation that I attended during this session was very interesting to our team, and it involved a basic study done with children in Kindergarten, using a prototype interactive tabletop surface. The study compared the success of the children in the same activity in both a physical and virtual setting, that of playing with a model treehouse. They found that the students had approximately the same success rate in both settings. One of the more interesting parts of the presentation was the finger positioning identified by the research team. We have also observed in our own sessions at Heartspring that children do not often interact with the table the same way as adults, instead placing their entire hand on an object, or placing most of the hand flat just above the surface, as opposed to creating a clear one-touch finger-point action like most adults seem to do. Another interesting note is that the experiment made use of a DiamondTouch table, which you may recall I discussed in my previous post, and dismissed as inadequate for our own uses. This presentation seemed to verify my initial observations, as the research team had a very difficult time getting the students to keep their feet flat on the required mat, and also experienced cases of the children moving the table and climbing on top of it try and reach far away objects. They also had issues with children leaning over the table and blocking the image, since it is projected from above the table instead of below, as our current tabletop design does.

Well, that’s about all for now. I will be attending a networking dinner tonight with the other conference participants, and then we have another full day of presentations to look forward to tomorrow. Good bye for now!

Riley Dutton
rdutton (at) heartspring (dot) org

Tags: Amsterdam, conference, IEEE Tabletops, travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 8:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.