Roman Lissermann, Jochen Huber, Martin Schmitz, Jürgen Steimle, Max Mühlhäuser

Abstract

We contribute Permulin, an integrated set of interaction and visualization techniques for multi-view tabletops to support co-located collaboration across a wide variety of collaborative coupling styles. These techniques (1) provide support both for group work and for individual work, as well as for the transitions in-between, (2) contribute sharing and peeking techniques to support mutual awareness and group coordination during phases of individual work, (3) reduce interference during group work on a group view, and (4) directly integrate with conventional multi-touch input. We illustrate our techniques in a proof-of-concept implementation with the two example applications of map navigation and photo collages. Results from two user studies demonstrate that Permulin supports fluent transitions between individual and group work and exhibits unique awareness properties that allow participants to be highly aware of each other during tightly coupled collaboration, while being able to unobtrusively perform individual work during loosely coupled collaboration.