From clicks to touches: Enabling face-to-face shared social interface on multi-touch tabletops

Abstract

Making the interactions with a digital user interface disappears into and becomes a part of the human to human interaction and conversation is a challenge. Conventional metaphor and underlying interface infrastructure for single-user desktop systems have been traditionally geared towards single mouse and keyboard, click-and-type based, WIMP interface design. On the other hand, people usually meet in social context around a table, facing each other. A table setting provides a large interactive visual and tangible surface. It affords and encourages collaboration, coordination, serendipity, as well as simultaneous and parallel interaction among multiple people. In this paper, we examine and explore the opportunities, challenges, research issues, pitfalls, and plausible approaches for enabling direct touchable, shared social interactions on multi-touch multi-user tabletops. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.