Abstract—A distinct feature observed in computer use in schools or rural kiosks in developing countries is the high student-to-computer ratio. It is not unusual to see more than five children crowding around a single display, as schools are rarely funded to afford one PC per child in a classroom. One child controls the mouse, while others are passive onlookers, without operational control of the computer. Learning benefits appear to accrue primarily to the child with the mouse, with the other children missing out. The obvious technical solution is to provide each child with a mouse and cursor on screen, thus effectively multiplying the amount of interaction per student per PC for the cost of a few extra mice. To our surprise, both the concept and the implementation appear to be unique to date, for the specific application to computers in education in resource-strapped communities, with previous work restricting studies to two mice, or for largely non-educational applications. We have developed software that allows multiple coloured cursors to co-exist on the monitor, along with two sample games with some educational content. Initial trials with both singlemouse and multiple-mice scenarios suggest that children are more engaged when in control of a mouse, and that more mice increases overall engagement. Our results suggest new areas of research in pedagogy for computers in education.

Designing collaborative interfaces for tabletops remains difficult because we do not fully understand how groups coordinate their actions when working collaboratively over tables. We present two observational studies of pairs completing independent and shared tasks that investigate collaborative coupling, or the manner in which collaborators are involved and occupied with each other’s work. Our results indicate that individuals frequently and fluidly engage and disengage with group activity through several distinct, recognizable states with unique characteristics. We describe these states and explore the consequences of these states for tabletop interface design. Author Keywords Collaborative tabletop displays, single display groupware, mixed focus collaboration, coordination, coupling ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3. Group and organizational interfaces: computersupported cooperative work.

www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen In this paper we present an initial study into the feasibility of using a mobile phone as a personal tactile display when interacting with a tabletop computer. There has been an increase in recent years in large touchscreen computers that use soft keyboards for text input. Text entry performance on such keyboards can be poor due to the lack of tactile feedback from the keys. Our approach is to use the vibration motor in a user‟s mobile phone to provide personal haptic feedback for interactions with the touchscreen computer. We ran an experiment to compare text entry on a touchscreen device with the tactile feedback being presented at different distal locations on the body (locations at which a user might keep a mobile device. The conditions were: no tactile feedback, feedback directly on the device, feedback at the wrist, upper

AbstractAlmost all system and application design for multimedia systems is based around a single user working in isolation to perform some task yet much of the work for which we use computers to help us, is based on working collaboratively with colleagues. Groupware systems do support user collaboration but typically this is supported through software and users still physically work in independently. Tabletop systems such as the DiamondTouch from MERL, are interface devices which support direct user collaboration on a tabletop. When a tabletop is used as the interface for a multimedia system, such as a video search system, then this kind of direct collaboration raises many questions for system design. In this paper we present a tabletop system for supporting a pair of users in a video search task and we evaluate the system not only in terms of search performance but also in terms of user-user interaction and how different user personalities within each a pair of searchers impacts search performance and user interaction. Incorporating the user into the system evaluation as we have done here reveals several interesting results and has important ramifications for the design of a multimedia search system. 1

In this paper we present the system we have developed for our participation in the annual TRECVid benchmarking activity, specifically the system we have developed, Físchlár-DT, for participation in the interactive search task of TRECVid 2005. Our back-end search engine uses a combination of a text search which operates over the automatic speech recognised text, and an image search which uses low-level image features matched against video keyframes. The two novel aspects of our work are the fact that we are evaluating collaborative, team-based search among groups of users working together, and that we are using a novel touch-sensitive tabletop interface and interaction device known as the DiamondTouch to support this collaborative search. The paper summarises the backend search systems as well as presenting the interface we have developed, in detail.

Abstract. When several users interact with Single Display Groupware (SDG) (Stewart et al., 1999) applications over a shared display, the potential exists for one user’s actions to spatially interfere with another’s (Tse et al., 2004; Zanella and Greenberg, 2001). We empirically evaluate four techniques for mitigating spatial interference in SDG: shared display with object ownership, spatially split display, shared display with uniform transparency between users ’ data, and shared display with gradient transparency from one edge of the display to the other. Apart from time and error performance measures, we also consider the impact of each technique on user’s voluntary partitioning of the available display space. Results show that the best approach in terms of performance is to share the entire display with appropriate use of transparency techniques for minimizing interference, and allow users to decide for themselves how they wish to partition the space, rather than pre-partitioning it for them. Results also show that complete sharing may result in misuse of screen space and demonstrate the potential of gradient transparency as a technique that effectively balances costs and benefits of both sharing and partitioning.

Handoff of objects and tools occurs frequently and naturally in face-to-face work; in tabletop groupware, however, digital handoff is often awkward. In this paper, we investigate ways of improving support for digital handoff in tabletop systems. We first observed how handoff works at a physical table, and then compared the performance of tangible and standard transfer techniques on digital tables. Based on our observations, we developed a new technique called force-field handoff that allows objects to drift between pointers that are approaching one another. We tested force-field handoff in an experiment, and found that it is significantly faster than current digital handoff; no difference was found with tangible handoff. In addition, force-field handoff was preferred by the majority of participants. 1.

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Applications running on multi-touch tabletops are beginning to be developed to enable children to collaborate on a variety of activities, from photo sharing to playing games. However, little is know as to how children work together on such interactive surfaces. We present a study that investigated groups of children’s use of a multitouch tabletop for a shared-space design task, requiring reasoning and compromise. The OurSpace application was designed to allow children to arrange the desks in their classroom and allocate students to seats around those desks. A number of findings are reported, including a comparison of single versus multiple touch, equity of participation, and an analysis of how a child’s tabletop position affects where he or she touches. A main finding was that children used all of the tabletop surface, but took more responsibility for the parts of the design closer to their relative position.

Recent technology improvements have led to two trends- larger display screens in the home and more personal computing devices (with displays) being used in the home. We believe these two trends will converge. We want to understand the implications and possibilities of using a large shared display in combination with a small personal display for a variety of in-home applications. This thesis addresses three questions. First, can multiple users work on loosely coupled tasks on a single shared large display? Second, if users are able to work in parallel on a single display, what is the impact of adding a personal display to the large shared display for collaborative tasks? Finally, for those applications that utilize a small personal display and a large display, how difficult is it for users to switch their attention between the displays? We completed a pilot study, a main study and a follow-up study to answer these questions. Subsequently we utilized the results to design and develop the Family Blog, a collaborative application using mobile phones and a large shared display. The results from our pilot study show that users are able to share a large display for loosely coupled