Movementable: The design of moving interactive tabletops

Abstract

MovemenTable (MT) is an exploration of moving interactive tabletops which can physically move, gather together or depart according to people’s dynamically varying interaction tasks and collaborative needs. We present the design and implementation of a set of MT prototypes and discuss a technique that allows MT to augment its visual content in order to provide motion cues to users. We outline a set of interaction scenarios using single and multiple MTs in public, social and collaborative settings and discuss four user studies based on these scenarios, assessing how people perceive MT movements, how these movements affect their interaction, and how synchronized movements of multiple MTs impacts people’s collaborative interactions. Our findings confirm that MT’s augmentation of its visual content was helpful in providing motion cues to users, and that MT’s movement had significant effects on people’s spatial behaviors during interaction, effects that peaked in collaborative scenarios with multiple MTs.