Visually Augmented Interfaces for Co-located Mobile Collaboration

Abstract

We explore the difficulties involved with tightly coupled collaborative work on mobile devices. Small screens and separate workspaces hinder close interaction, even for co-located users. We begin our inquiry with a set of user focus groups to determine collaborative usage patterns, determining that shared workspaces present an opportunity to overcome the barriers to collaboration. The case for integrating awareness information into such distributed systems has been well established. We present two conceptual designs using visualization cues to present user awareness information, the first for co-located mobile devices, and the second using a mobile projector.