Collaboration Meets Interactive Surfaces: A Brief Introduction

Excerpt

The vast screen real estate provided in large-scale interaction environments, presents novel ways to visualize and interact with data-rich models. In parallel to this technological revolution, interactive surfaces have also become widespread in different sizes and devices, from large-scale walls to small-size handheld mobile devices. Indeed, the interactive surfaces community witnessed, in recent years, an increased usage of interactive tables, tablet-sized surfaces, and touch-sensitive mobile phones. The opportunities for innovation exist, but the problem of offering effective collaboration activities using multiple interactive surfaces, especially in complex work domains, has not yet been thoroughly addressed. Of particular interest is the potential synergy that one can obtain by effectively combining different-sized surfaces. In this context, this special issue brings together research aimed at improving collaborative experiences through the synergic combination of multiple interaction surfaces of diverse sizes and formats, ranging from large-scale walls, to tables, tablets, and phones. …