Interactive coffee table for exploration of personal photos and videos

Abstract

Interactive tabletops offer a unique opportunity for exploring home videos and photos. Nevertheless, there are still a number of unexplored challenges for effectively providing support for collocated group interaction around media. This paper reports on a user study involving 24 users, intended to better understanding the challenges ahead. Our volunteers (in couples) evaluated our media sharing application prototype, providing valuable feedback with regards to three key challenges: metaphor, digital ecosystem, and level of control. First, users appreciated the selected metaphor of physical photos, but without relinquishing software support, such as alignment and distribution of media items. Second, vertical auxiliary screens helped in supporting a bigger number of users and providing more comfort and a better viewing angle and stance. Third, the nature of the task (either storytelling or random exploration) had a strong influence on the control capabilities to be provided by the application. Fourth, personal spaces within the tabletop were useful for allowing independent navigation. We consider these results as relevant for the future developments of home media sharing applications for the living room.

Tactive, a Framework for Cross Platform Development of Tabletop Applications

“…Pedrosa et al, used tabletops to explore home videos and photos (Pedrosa et al, 2013). A set of 24 users evaluates an application which displays photos and videos on a horizontal touch surface to allow storytelling and random exploration.…”

“…In the last few years, the market of multi-touch tables is experiencing a situation very similar to what happens in the mobile applications market. The number of developed applications is dramatically increased, interactive tabletop surfaces are used to improve learning activities (Rick et al, 2011), inside museums (Geller, 2006), where the diversity of visitors create a natural laboratory for testing this kind of interface, to help the management of emergency (Qin et al, 2012), and in many other collaborative activities like, e. g., photoware (Pedrosa et al, 2013), etc. Consequently, also the the number of hardware solutions increased, each one requiring a particular SDK, programming language, etc.…”

Body Panning

“…Furthermore, tabletops are often used for exploration of spatially distributed digital artifact collections (e.g. photos and videos) by scaling and rotating touch sensitive objects [8]. Manipulation and selection of vast amounts of objects can also be found in planning and mapping scenarios.…”

Data input and content exploration in scenarios with restrictions

“…Another way of bringing an item back to the tabletop is sending another item to the TV. The communication between the tabletop and the TV is done through a server with WebSocket technology, using the Pusher service 3 . The TV shows a browser in full screen mode.…”

“…No performance evaluation of Eype has been reported. However, this approach is similar in concept to SHARK 2 [Kristensson and Zhai, 2004], an established touch-based word-level gesture keyboard technique which has inspired many subsequent systems, such as Word Flow 3 , and has been well evaluated. Thus, for our shape-based approach, we implement an adaptation of SHARK 2 , to work with eye-trackers.…”