uPlatform: A customizable multi-user windowing system for interactive tabletop

Abstract

Interactive tabletop has shown great potential in facilitating face-to-face collaboration in recent years. Yet, in spite of much promising research, one important area that remains largely unexplored is the windowing system on tabletop, which can enable users to work with multiple independent or collaborative applications simultaneously. As a consequence, investigation of many scenarios such as conferencing and planning has been rather limited. To address this limitation, we present uPlatform, a multi-user windowing system specifically created for interactive tabletop. It is built based on three components: 1) an input manager for processing concurrent multi-modal inputs; 2) a window manager for controlling multi-user policies; 3) a hierarchical structure for organizing multi-task windows. All three components allow to be customized through a simple, flexible API. Based on uPlatform, three systems, uMeeting, uHome and uDining are implemented, which demonstrate its efficiency in building multi-user windowing systems on interactive tabletop. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.