Multi-touch tables

Wheelchair users can find accessing digital content on large multi-touch tables particularly difficult and frustrating due to their limited reach. We present work in progress that is exploring the potential of enhancing touch table accessibility through the use of mid-air gesturing technology. An overview of an experimental prototype is provided along with the key findings from an evaluation conducted with fifteen wheelchair users at a public library and heritage centre.

Multi-touch tables are increasingly being used in public spaces such as museums, art galleries, and libraries to help engage the public and provide access to collections. Design- ing applications for this type of environment where a wide variety of people can use the table raises unique interaction issues that need to be addressed. This chapter initially provides a detailed review of research studies that have investigated the impact of multi-touch tables in cultural heritage environments. A case study into the design of a touch table application for The Hive (the first integrated public/university library and history centre in Europe) is then presented where we highlight issues experienced and lessons learned during the development process. In particular, we cover requirements gathering, design approaches used, the selection of appropriate content (for a broad user base), installation and maintenance of a table, and details of an initial informal evaluation.

.In this paper we present a new tool, NumberNet, designed to promote within and between group collaboration in a mathematics classroom. The activity builds on a standard individual mathematics activity (Explode-A-Number; Atkinson, 1992), to create a three-stage collaborative activity that promotes flexibility with numbers, operators and calculations. This tool uses a network of multi-touch tabletop computers in a classroom environment, taking students through a small group production activity, rotation of the activity between groups, and finally a sorting and structuring activity. Pilot results from 32 students indicate significant gains in the number of calculations that students produce from pre to post test. Further work and implications are described.

In this paper we describe the design and development of a multi-touch surface and software that challenges current approaches to the production and consumption of comics. Authorship of the comics involves drawing the 'top level' of the story directly onto paper and projecting lower-level narrative elements, such as objects, characters, dialogue, descriptions and/or events onto the paper via a multi-touch interface. In terms of the impact this has upon the experience of reading and writing, the implementation of paper is intended to facilitate the creation of high-level overviews of stories, while the touch surface allows users to generate branches through the addition of artifacts in accordance with certain theories about interactive narratives. This provides the opportunity to participate in the reading and authoring of both traditional, paper-based texts and interactive, digital scenarios. Prototype comics are used to demonstrate this approach to reading and writing top-level and low-level narratives.

This exploratory study is about the design, development and evaluation of an interactive application on multi-touch table, in order to enhance students' learning of algebraic generalization in a collaborative learning environment. Multi-touch table technology allows users to work together on a task displayed on its screen, supporting rich forms of interaction amongst them. In order to investigate the context of the educational application, a paper prototype was designed and implemented into two classrooms of 26 students, aged 12-13, in an experimental school of Athens, Greece (pilot fieldwork). Data was analysed with the SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcome) taxonomy. Outcomes obtained from fieldwork fed into the design requirements that the final interactive prototype must meet. Thereafter, the final prototype was evaluated in the laboratory by two focus groups of users. Results show that students engaged in verbal interactions, affecting the understanding of the subsequent algebraic concepts introduced, encouraging further research.

Over the past few years, multi-touch user interfaces emerged from research prototypes into mass market products. This evolution has been mainly driven by innovative devices such as Apple's iPhone or Microsoft's Surface tabletop computer. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of software engineering abstractions in existing multi-touch development frameworks. Many multi-touch applications are based on hard-coded procedural low level event processing. This leads to proprietary solutions with a lack of gesture extensibility and cross-application reusability. We present Midas, a declarative model for the definition and detection of multi-touch gestures where gestures are expressed via logical rules over a set of input facts. We highlight how our rule-based language approach leads to improvements in gesture extensibility and reusability. Last but not least, we introduce JMidas, an instantiation of Midas for the Java programming language and describe how JMidas has been applied to implement a number of innovative multi-touch gestures.

The status quo for co-located groupware is to assume that "social protocols" (standards of polite behavior) are sufficient to coordinate the actions of a group of users; however, prior studies of groupware use as well as our own observations of groups using a shared tabletop display suggest potential for improving groupware interfaces by incorporating coordination policiesdirect manipulation mechanisms for avoiding and resolving conflicts. We discuss our observations of group tabletop usage and present our coordination framework. We conclude with example usage scenarios and discuss future research suggested by this framework.

We introduce a new multi-touch table “shoaling” application that we have been working on with the new Library of Birmingham (UK). This application contains shoals of assets taken from the Library’s collections that flock and swim around the tabletop. The assets are initially represented as small circular crops taken from full-size assets that attempt to intrigue and draw users in to explore further. These cropped circles can then be selected by visitors and expanded to reveal the surprise of the full asset. In this paper, we provide an overview of the shoaling application and share the design considerations that had to be taken into account when attempting to create a shared and collaborative visitor experience.

Multi-touch tabletops have noteworthy and promising affordances for co-composition as an activity in co-located and collaborative learning. In this paper we describe the use of co-composition as a guide in design of a multi-touch application for a museum's touring two-day workshop on architecture. The goal of the application is to support groups of students (12-13 year-olds) when they are creating, selecting, organizing, and presenting digital representations (co-composition) for an architectural workshop project. The goals of the application are discussed in relation to specific features in the user interface that we designed to take advantage of a multi touch approach. We ask how these features relate to co-composition and the pedagogical aims we had for the touring workshop. The features we envisioned would benefit from more well known standards for gestures and user interface components for multi-touch tables.

Multi-touch tables can help facilitate and improve collaborative interactions yet many users with physical disabilities (e.g. wheelchair users) find it extremely difficult to interact with large tables. This paper presents work-in-progress that is exploring the potential to enhance multi-touch table accessibility to enable disabled users to participate more effectively in collaborative interactions. An overview of a prototype that allows disabled users to manipulate digital content via mid-air finger gestures is provided along with details of upcoming research studies we will be conducting.

Multi-touch tabletops have noteworthy and promising affordances for co-composition as an activity in co-located and collaborative learning. In this paper we describe the use of co-composition as a guide in design of a multi-touch application for a museum's touring two-day workshop on architecture. The goal of the application is to support groups of students (12-13 year-olds) when they are creating, selecting, organizing, and presenting digital representations (co-composition) for an architectural workshop project. The goals of the application are discussed in relation to specific features in the user interface that we designed to take advantage of a multi touch approach. We ask how these features relate to co-composition and the pedagogical aims we had for the touring workshop. The features we envisioned would benefit from more well known standards for gestures and user interface components for multi-touch tables.

Description
The SynergyNet classroom was designed to integrate multi-touch tables into a typical classroom environment. The data to be presented in this symposium are concerned with how students working on a collaborative mathematics task, collaborated within and between groups to find solutions to problems, and how the orientation of the room influenced the teacher’s apparent or actual control and the collaboration between students.

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This paper presents two studies that examine emergent leadership in children’s collaborative learning groups. Building on research that finds that leadership moves are distributed among group members during learning activities, we examined whether there were patterns in the distribution of moves, resulting in different types of emergent leaders in groups.
Study one examines individual groups working with a teacher, on the same task either with paper or multi-touch tables. Study two examines groups of students in a multi-touch classroom.
Results from study one indicated that the leadership was distributed among the students; the distributions aligned with classifications of intellectual leadership moves and organisational leadership moves for about half of the groups. There were no differences in emergent leadership between themulti-touch and paper conditions. These results were explored in more detail in a multi-touch classroom study, exploring emergent leadership in 22 groups of students across six classes. Again, leadership was distributed among group members, and specific roles of intellectual and organizational leader, taken on by two different students, could be identified in half of the groups. These results suggest that attention should be paid to how students are engaging in collaborative learning tasks to ensure all students participate in the intellectual as well as organisational demands of the task. Additionally, the pattern of the distribution of roles suggests that care should be taken to specify behaviors if the role of leader is assigned to collaborative groups.