RealTimeChess: Lessons from a Participatory Design Process for a Collaborative Multi-Touch, Multi-User Game

We report on a long-term participatory design process during which we designed and improved RealTimeChess, a collaborative but competitive game that is played using touch input by multiple people on a tabletop display. During the design process we integrated concurrent input from all players and pace control, allowing us to steer the interaction along a continuum between high-paced simultaneous and low-paced turn-based gameplay. In addition, we integrated tutorials for teaching interaction techniques, mechanisms to control territoriality, remote interaction, and alert feedback. Integrating these mechanism during the participatory design process allowed us to examine their effects in detail, revealing for instance effects of the competitive setting on the perception of awareness as well as territoriality. More generally, the resulting application provided us with a testbed to study interaction on shared tabletop surfaces and yielded insights important for other time-critical or attention-demanding applications.

Group vs Individual: Impact of TOUCH and TILT Cross-Device Interactions on Mixed-Focus Collaboration

Cross-device environments (XDEs) have been devel-oped to support a multitude of collaborative activities. Yet, little is known about how different cross-device in-teraction techniques impact group collaboration; in-cluding their impact on independent and joint work that often occur during group work. In this work, we explore the impact of two XDE data browsing tech-niques: TOUCH and TILT. Through a mixed-methods study of a collaborative sensemaking task, we show that TOUCH and TILT have distinct impacts on how groups accomplish, and shift between, independent and joint work. Finally, we reflect on these findings and how they can more generally inform the design of XDEs.NSER

Collaborative music interaction on tabletops: an HCI approach

With the advent of tabletop interaction, collaborative activities are better supported than they are on single-user PCs because there exists a physical shareable space, and interaction with digital data is more embodied and social. In sound and music computing, collaborative music making has traditionally been done using interconnected networks, but using separated computers. Musical tabletops introduce opportunities of playing in collaboration through sharing physically the same musical interface. However, few tabletop musical interfaces exploit this collaborative potential (e.g. the Reactable). We are interested in looking into how collaboration can be fully supported by means of musical tabletops for music performance in contrast with more traditional settings. We are also looking at whether collective musical engagement can be enhanced by providing more suitable interfaces to collaboration. In HCI and software development, we find an iterative process approach of design and evaluation—where evaluation allows us to identify key issues that can be addressed in the next design iteration of the system. Using a similar iterative approach, we plan to design and evaluate some tabletop musical interfaces. The aim is to understand what design choices can enhance and enrich collaboration and collective musical engagement on these systems. In this paper, we explain the evaluation methodologies we have undertaken in three preliminary pilot studies, and the lessons we have learned. Initial findings indicate that evaluating tabletop musical interfaces is a complex endeavour which requires an approach as close as possible to a real context, with an interdisciplinary approach provided by interaction analysis techniques

Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

Collaborating around digital tabletops: children’s physical strategies from the UK, India and Finland

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: the United Kingdom, India and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in India employed dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland used a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices

Investigating the Impact of Co-located and Distributed Collaboration Using Multi-touch Tables

With the intention to study the role of new interfaces in multi-user applications, multi-touch tabletops are investigated to examine if they effectively aid their users in working together synchronously. Multi-player games are selected as a case of collaborative work. Early studies of distributed multi-touch tabletops did not cover the HCI related aspects associated with multi-player games, especially in distributed configuration. The performance, collaboration, and usability aspects of HCI are studied in this research. A simple multi-player maze game has been designed and implemented over two connected and physically separated multi-touch tabletops. The aim of this work is to investigate the effects of distribution on players performance, collaboration, and usability of multi-player games over multi-touch tabletops, compared to playing in a co-located condition. Groups of participants have been randomly selected and assigned to play the game in pairs under two conditions: co-located where two players are playing the game on the same table, and distributed where they are playing the game but on separate tables. The collected data is statistically analysed to test for differences between the two conditions, as well as the differences of the strength of the correlation between the underlying factors. The results indicate that, in general, the differences are not significant for such type of applications if a simple and efficient communication mechanism is provided for the players in the distributed condition. Players expressed almost the same level of usability engagement and enjoyment for the two conditions. This may have a strong impact on the HCI aspects when designing such type of applications on the future

Entry and access : how shareability comes about

Shareability is a design principle that refers to how a system, interface, or device engages a group of collocated, co-present users in shared interactions around the same content (or the same object). This is broken down in terms of a set of components that facilitate or constrain the way an interface (or product) is made shareable. Central are the notions of access points and entry points. Entry points invite and entice people into engagement, providing an advance overview, minimal barriers, and a honeypot effect that draws observers into the activity. Access points enable users to join a group's activity, allowing perceptual and manipulative access and fluidity of sharing. We show how these terms can be useful for informing analysis and empirical research

Towards a teacher-centric approach for multi-touch surfaces in classrooms

The potential of tabletops to enable simultaneous interaction and face-to-face collaboration can provide novel learning opportunities. Despite significant research in the area of collaborative learning around tabletops, little attention has been paid to the integration of multi-touch surfaces into classroom layouts and how to employ this technology to facilitate teacher-learner dialogue and teacher-led activities across multi-touch surfaces. While most existing techniques focus on the collaboration between learners, this work aims to gain a better understanding of practical challenges that need to be considered when integrating multi-touch surfaces into classrooms. It presents a multi-touch interaction technique, called TablePortal, which enables teachers to manage and monitor collaborative learning on students' tables. Early observations of using the proposed technique within a novel classroom consisting of networked

Collocated Collaboration Analytics: Principles and Dilemmas for Mining Multimodal Interaction Data

© 2019, Copyright © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Learning to collaborate effectively requires practice, awareness of group dynamics, and reflection; often it benefits from coaching by an expert facilitator. However, in physical spaces it is not always easy to provide teams with evidence to support collaboration. Emerging technology provides a promising opportunity to make collocated collaboration visible by harnessing data about interactions and then mining and visualizing it. These collocated collaboration analytics can help researchers, designers, and users to understand the complexity of collaboration and to find ways they can support collaboration. This article introduces and motivates a set of principles for mining collocated collaboration data and draws attention to trade-offs that may need to be negotiated en route. We integrate Data Science principles and techniques with the advances in interactive surface devices and sensing technologies. We draw on a 7-year research program that has involved the analysis of six group situations in collocated settings with more than 500 users and a variety of surface technologies, tasks, grouping structures, and domains. The contribution of the article includes the key insights and themes that we have identified and summarized in a set of principles and dilemmas that can inform design of future collocated collaboration analytics innovations