Up close and personal

Abstract

Multitouch wall-sized displays afford new forms of collaboration: They can be used up close by several users simultaneously, offer high resolution, and provide sufficient space for intertwining individual and joint work. The difference to displays without these capabilities is not well understood. To better understand the collaboration of groups around high-resolution multitouch wall displays, we conducted an exploratory study. Pairs collaborated on a problem-solving task using a 2.8m × 1.2m multitouch display with 24.8 megapixels. The study examines how participants collaborate; navigate relative to the display and to each other; and interact with and share the display. Participants physically navigated among different parts of the display, switched fluidly between parallel and joint work, and shared the display evenly. The results contrast earlier research that suggests difficulties in sharing and collaborating around wall displays. The study suggests that multitouch wall displays can support different collaboration styles and fluid transitions in group work.

Creating Your Bubble

“…This finding fills a gap in the literature where research has identified correlations between proximity and degree of coupling [26], but has also noted that pairs can work effectively at a distance in front of large displays [14]. Further, these results suggest a need to augment proxemic and territoriality theories for use in LPDs.…”

Is Two Enough?

“…One stream of this research are cross-device systems to support collaborative sensemaking tasks with large interactive walls [2,22,43] or interactive tabletops [21,23,37,36,51]. Some approaches also combine tablets for personal use with tabletops [34,53,57].…”

Shared Interaction on a Wall-Sized Display in a Data Manipulation Task

“…Wall-sized displays are well-suited to small groups of users working together on large amounts of data: Multiple users can move freely in front of the display to get an overview or see details without changing its content [2], leading to a variety of collaboration styles [11]. Previous work has demonstrated the benefits of such displays in various tasks including sensemaking [1], way-finding [17], searching [22] and exploratory visual analysis [21].…”

“…http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858039 required users to manipulate data, not just observe or navigate it. Indeed, in many cognitive tasks such as sense-making [3] or problem-solving [11], users need to reorganize data items to solve the task. However, little research has studied the effects of shared interaction on co-located collaborative work that involves data manipulation in such settings.…”

“…Designing effective interaction for collaboration requires a deep understanding of situations involving complex phenomena when multiple users interact with the artifacts as well as communicate with each other [28]. Previous studies of group work on large displays have consisted mostly of observational studies identifying various collaborative strategies, from loosely to tightly coupled work, when performing a task such as drawing [26], writing [4], route finding [25], visual analytics [10], problem solving [11] or sense-making [27]. While observational studies capture high-level phenomena, we believe that they should be complemented by controlled laboratory studies to better understand low-level phenomena occuring at the articulatory level in collaborative work.…”