View slides from this talk here.

Interactive surfaces that potentially support many points-of-contact control with visual feedback directly beneath the user's fingers are increasingly flooding the consumer market. Interactive surfaces like H.P.'s TouchSmart PC and Microsoft's Surface can potentially empower users with new and rich forms of interaction. However, despite the ready availability of technology to support rich interaction, there is a lack of understanding of how to support simple and fundamental interactions such as selecting and pointing; actions that are often taken for granted in desktop interfaces. This seminar will focus on one form of Interactive Surface; Digital Tables, which are horizontal computationally enhanced interactive surfaces.

In the physical world, tables are perhaps the most common site for shared work with tools and task artifacts. Tables provide a practical setting for users to examine large documents (like maps) and encourage multiple users to gather around to collaborate. However, digital tabletops are only beginning to approach the flexibility and simplicity that is evident in face-to-face collaboration. In order to enable the smooth and fluid interaction that is visible in physical settings, digital tabletop workspaces must support the basic low-level actions and interactions that enable people to carry out tasks in a shared fashion with a fluidity that approaches the physical setting.

In order to make interaction with digital tables effortless and fluid, we have been investigating new interaction techniques that support tasks like content orientation, distant-object reaching and multi-user interaction. In this talk, I will present some of the interaction techniques that I have developed for effortless interaction on digital tables.