No abstract

Computer supported collaborative work supports the interaction and joint task solving between humans by setting a machine or computer in-between. Similarly, collaborative environments support decisionmakings incorporating different points of view and a variety of competences. As such, the identification and selection of the underlying requirements involved in collaboration is a challenging task. In order to facilitate this task, we performed a thorough literature review with the aim to discern such requirements. The result is a set of qualitative criteria that can be applied to generic computer supported collaboration environments. Furthermore, the mapping of the generic catalogue to a specific collaboration task is demonstrated.

This paper describes the MTGest framework, an open library for adding multi-touch gesture interaction to HTML-based mobile web applications. MTGest was used in a comparative study to evaluate the multi-touch gesture interaction in a mobile web application in comparison to a native iOS mobile application. The results indicates that in most cases the web based gestures efficiency is either approximately the same or higher than the iOS-based app. The study was carried out as an initial experiment using isolated gestures, targeting the iOS platform only. For generalizing the results there is a need to perform detailed user evaluation studies with different platforms and for more complex interaction scenarios.

We introduce a framework for distributed or colocated teams to collaborate highly efficiently using diverse mobile devices for design and assessment of complex systems. Our framework enhances the efficiency of collaborations arising in design, simulation or data analysis, including visualization. First, we investigate which requirements on such a collaboration framework exist and which influences between task models have to be taken into account; afterwards we transfer those findings into a prototypical system. The devices provide three views of data to be processed collaboratively: (1) a simulation view; (2) a status report view; and (3) a status update view. These views serve the purpose of providing overview, detail and performance views. A smart watch view shows at-a-glance information, the environment or the process being inspected, possibly influenced by a user. Users can use their mobile devices as control interfaces. The framework is especially effective for combining the synergis- tic, complementary competencies of a team. We describe the design of our framework and discuss specific applications.