The effects of personal displays and transfer techniques on collaboration strategies in multi-touch based multi-display environments

Abstract

Multi-touch tabletop systems promise to enhance collaboration in multi-display (MDE) environments. However, little is known about the effects of combining shared multi-touch tabletops with multi-touch tablet computers (tablets) as the collaborators' personal displays. In this paper we present the implementation of a MDE with multi-touch input on both shared and personal displays and its evaluation regarding task performance, user preferences and collaboration strategies compared to a standard multi-touch tabletop setting. Eight participant pairs had to solve a collaborative sorting task using three different transfer techniques. Based on an analysis of video recordings, log files and user feedback we identified task solving and collaboration strategies. The use of tablets enabled participants to follow diverse strategies and participants preferred the collaboration using tablets, while overall task performance and the amount of close collaboration were higher without the tablets. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.