Abstract
Table-based collaboration support systems are an emerging technology that uses advantageous digital information technologies to enhance a traditional table, which is a well suited workspace for the collaboration of multiple workers. The technical advantages of such a table-based system (1) enable participants to naturally share non-verbal modalities such as eye contact and gestures and (2) allow users to hold discussions by using both real objects and information displayed on a horizontal screen. Various researches about table-based systems are in progress. This paper overviews such systems by focusing on the three major issues among them. The first issue is an interaction method suitable for table-based systems. Multi-touch input methods have been proposed to simultaneously enable participants to manipulate displayed information. The second is the orientation of displayed information. Table-based systems suffer a common problem: not equally recognizing shared information such as text and images because the orientation of their view angle is unfavorable. Solving/utilizing such inequality of viewing information is an important issue. The third is cooperated action between objects and tabletop surfaces. Methods have been proposed for providing haptic feedback to objects and utilizing objects as tiny screens. This paper also introduces two prototype systems as concrete examples of ongoing researches: the Lumisight Table and the t-Room. The former can simultaneously provide different images to users around the table. By using these characteristics, a multilingual face-to-face idea generation support system has been developed for the Lumisight Table. The latter is a work environment that aims to support collaboration executed between two distant places. Tabletop display in the t-Room is utilized as the basis for sharing physical objects between two distant places.
