Territorial coordination and workspace awareness in remote tabletop collaboration

  • Authors:

  • Philip Tuddenham;Peter Robinson

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

There is growing interest in tabletop interfaces that enable remote collaboration by providing shared workspaces. This approach assumes that these remote tabletops afford the same beneficial work practices as co-located tabletop interfaces and traditional tables. This assumption has not been tested in practice. We explore two such work practices in remote tabletop collaboration: (a) coordination by territorial partitioning of space; and (b) transitioning between individual and group work within a shared task. We have evaluated co-located and remote tabletop collaboration. We found that remote collaborators did not coordinate territorially as co-located collaborators did. We found no differences between remote and co-located interfaces in their ability to afford individual and group work. However, certain interaction techniques impaired the ability to transition fluidly between these working styles. We discuss causes and the implications for the design and future study of these interfaces.