Digital Workrooms of the Future

Designing fluid interaction techniques and applications for collaboration

Digital workrooms are places where teams will work and make decisions from in the future. We envision such rooms as being comprised of multiple large-scale interactive surfaces as well as personal devices such as mobile devices, tablets, and laptops. Our interest is to designing interaction techniques and applications for such environments that allow people to work effectively and fluidly with one another. Our intention is to build powerful tools that augment how teams think and operate. Our work in this space is long-running and multi-faceted.

Our efforts in designing interaction techniques and applications for multi-surface environments are grounded by studies of traditional whiteboard use.
Our efforts in designing interaction techniques and applications for multi-surface environments are grounded by studies of traditional whiteboard use.

Foundational Studies of Collaborative Work. We have conducted several foundational studies of the ways in which people work and operate with traditional surfaces (e.g. tabletops and whiteboards) in order to extract and understand design requirements for digital counterparts (Tang, Lanir, Greenberg, & Fels, 2009; Tang & Fels, 2008; Tang, Parker, Lanir, Booth, & Fels, 2006).

ShadowReaching is an interaction technique that allows people to reach hard-to-touch areas of the workspace through a shadow metaphor. Here you see concept (left), conception (centre), and prototype (right).
ShadowReaching is an interaction technique that allows people to reach hard-to-touch areas of the workspace through a shadow metaphor. Here you see concept (left), conception (centre), and prototype (right).

Interaction Techniques. We have also designed many different kinds of interaction techniques, including the now famous Rotate-N-Translate technique, which is a standard interaction technique on most touch surfaces (Kruger, Carpendale, Scott, & Tang, 2005), as well as full-body shadow-based interaction techniques (Shoemaker, Tang, & Booth, 2007), and we have explored designing gesture-based techniques for interaction in MSEs (Seyed, Burns, Costa Sousa, Maurer, & Tang, 2012).

Spalendar is a spatially-aware calendar that makes of proxemic variables (distance, orientation, etc.) of a user for interaction. Above, we illustrate several interaction techniques implemented in this prototype.
Spalendar is a spatially-aware calendar that makes of proxemic variables (distance, orientation, etc.) of a user for interaction. Above, we illustrate several interaction techniques implemented in this prototype.

Applications. To ground our explorations, we have also designed several concrete applications. These applications range in terms of domain, and application scenario. For instance, (missing reference) explore the design and use of publicly accessible displays in public settings, where we designed mobile phone-based interaction techniques for interacting with the public display. We have also studied specific application scenarios, including medical data exploration (Seyed, Rodrigues, Maurer, & Tang, 2014; Seyed, Rodrigues, Maurer, & Tang, 2014), brainstorming scenarios with paper-based interaction (missing reference), teaching and learning scenarios where students use devices to interact with large projected displays (Lanir, Booth, & Tang, 2010), awareness displays for colleagues (Chen, Boring, Carpendale, Tang, & Greenberg, 2012), oil and gas exploration (Seyed, Costa Sousa, Maurer, & Tang, 2013), and decision making support for software engineering (Aseniero, Wun, Ledo, Ruhe, Tang, & Carpendale, 2015; Aseniero, 2014).

EXCITE allows us to study <em>how</em> people are collaborating within multi-surface environments, allowing us to track and make sense of their actions and activities.
EXCITE allows us to study how people are collaborating within multi-surface environments, allowing us to track and make sense of their actions and activities.

Tools for Understanding MSE Use. To support our studies of how people make use of these tools, we have designed several tools that allow us to visualize and understand how people are making use of the tools, which in turn allows us to design more effective tools for collaboration in MSEs (Marquardt, Schardong, & Tang, 2015; Tang, Pahud, Carpendale, & Buxton, 2010).

Publications

  1. Nicolai Marquardt, Frederico Schardong, and Anthony Tang. (2015). EXCITE: EXploring Collaborative Interaction in Tracked Environments. In INTERACT 2015: Proceedings of INTERACT 2015 - 16th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, 89–97. (conference).
    Acceptance: 93/319 - 29.6%.
  2. Bon Adriel Aseniero, Tiffany Wun, David Ledo, Guenther Ruhe, Anthony Tang, and Sheelagh Carpendale. (2015). STRATOS: Using Visualization to Support Decisions in Strategic Software Release Planning. In CHI 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 1479–1488. (conference).
  3. Bon Adriel Aseniero. (2014). STRATOS: The Design of Visualization to Support Decision-making in Software Release Planning. (thesis).
  4. Teddy Seyed, Francisco Marinho Rodrigues, Frank Maurer, and Anthony Tang. (2014). Exploring 3D volumetric medical data using mobile devices. In 3DUI 2014: 2014 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces, IEEE, 173–174. (poster).
  5. Teddy Seyed, Francisco Marinho Rodrigues, Frank Maurer, and Anthony Tang. (2014). Medical Imaging Specialists and 3D: A Domain Perspective on Mobile 3D Interactions. In CHI EA ’14: CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2341–2346. (poster).
    Acceptance: 49% - 241/496. Notes: 6-page abstract + poster..
  6. Teddy Seyed, Mario Costa Sousa, Frank Maurer, and Anthony Tang. (2013). SkyHunter: a multi-surface environment for supporting oil and gas exploration. In ITS ’13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces, ACM, 15–22. (conference).
    Acceptance: 29% - 35/121.
  7. Teddy Seyed, Chris Burns, Mario Costa Sousa, Frank Maurer, and Anthony Tang. (2012). Eliciting usable gestures for multi-display environments. In ITS ’12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces, ACM, 41–50. (conference).
    Acceptance: 29% - 30/103.
  8. Xiang ’Anthony’ Chen, Sebastian Boring, Sheelagh Carpendale, Anthony Tang, and Saul Greenberg. (2012). Spalendar: visualizing a group’s calendar events over a geographic space on a public display. In AVI ’12: Proceedings of the International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, ACM, 689–696. (conference).
  9. Joel Lanir, Kellog S. Booth, and Anthony Tang. (2010). Enabling Student Control of a Classroom’s Shared Screen. In EIST 2010: Next Generation of HCI and Education: Workshop on UI Technology and Education Pedagogy - Workshop at CHI 2010. (Tse, Edward and Schöning, Johannes and Rogers, Yvonne and Shen, Chia and Morrison, Gerald, Eds.) (workshop).
  10. Anthony Tang, Michel Pahud, Sheelagh Carpendale, and Bill Buxton. (2010). VisTACO: visualizing tabletop collaboration. In ITS ’10: ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, ACM, 29–38. (conference).
  11. Anthony Tang, Joel Lanir, Saul Greenberg, and Sidney Fels. (2009). Supporting transitions in work: informing large display application design by understanding whiteboard use. In GROUP ’09: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work, ACM, 149–158. (conference).
  12. Anthony Tang and Sid Fels. (2008). Four Lessons from Traditional MDEs. In Beyond the Laboratory: Supporting Authentic Collaboration with Multiple Displays - Workshop at CSCW 2008. (Biehl, Jacob and Golovchinsky, Gene and Lyons, Kent, Eds.) (workshop).
  13. Garth Shoemaker, Anthony Tang, and Kellogg S. Booth. (2007). Shadow reaching: a new perspective on interaction for large displays. In UIST ’07: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, ACM, 53–56. (conference).
  14. Anthony Tang, J Karen Parker, Joel Lanir, KS Booth, and Sidney Fels. (2006). Studying collaborative surface use to guide large display interaction design. In Conference Companion of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 219–220. (poster).
  15. Russell Kruger, Sheelagh Carpendale, Stacey D. Scott, and Anthony Tang. (2005). Fluid integration of rotation and translation. In CHI ’05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 601–610. (conference).