Collaboration technology and multi-user interfaces

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Interaction techniques for shared displays in collocated environments present a number of challenges. The proposed research examines the affordances of tabletop, large wall-mounted, and hand-held displays to determine how each best supports specific tasks during face-to-face collaboration, and how each can augment the other. Investigations of novel multi-touch interaction techniques and techniques for use at a distance from the display are being conducted, especially in collaborative environments where mutual awareness of each other's workflow must be traded off against interference and distraction by one user's interaction with another's workflow. Privacy and security issues arise in ad hoc collaborations, where mutual trust cannot be assumed. In these situations the usability of privacy features becomes an important concern that is being studied. Classroom and meeting room presentations on shared displays are of special interest. Research in actual classrooms with special-purpose software to support multiple projectors extends standard PowerPoint presentations to much larger screen areas more like traditional multi-blackboard "chalk talk" lectures. Specific pedagogical hypotheses and new ways to engage students as active participants, rather than simply passive receptors, will be tested. Novel uses of personal response systems ("clickers") to support "hands on" learning by large groups of students are being designed to examine how technology can enrich classroom experience. Augmented, mixed, and hybrid reality each offer another avenue for research on shared displays. In this case the displays are super-imposed or embedded in physical objects. Interaction techniques that flow seamlessly back and forth between the real and virtual representations of the objects or the information underlying them are being studied. Recent work on multi-projector augmented reality techniques for architectural plans will be continued in a number of directions.