Supporting Effective Interaction with Tabletop Groupware

Current computing systems are primarily designed for a single person working alone at a PC, with support for enabling remote collaboration over a network. However, traditional work practices involve not only individual work and communication with remote colleagues, but also face-to-face group meetings and activities. This latter class of interactions remains largely unsupported by computing technology. In this talk, I will focus on one particular means of computer support for face-to-face group work: interactive tables. Interactive tables are computer-augmented tables that support simultaneous inputs from a group of co-located users. This emerging class of devices presents interesting challenges for user interface design. In this talk, I will discuss several challenges in designing applications for interactive tables, covering issues such as the orientation of information, widget layouts, appropriate input mechanisms, integrating personal content, multi-user coordination, and the impact of tabletop UIs on group dynamics. I will present implementations and evaluations of prototype tabletop systems that address these challenges.

Speaker Details

Meredith Ringel Morris will be graduating from Stanford University this spring, where she is completing her Ph.D. in computer science. She has also earned computer science M.S. (Stanford University, 2003) and B.S. (Brown University, 2001) degrees. Meredith’s research interests include human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. She has pursued these interests in the course of her dissertation research, as well as during internships at Microsoft Research, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, and AT&T Labs.