Papers
In this response I will discuss a paper regarding territoriality in physical tabletop applications, territoriality in digital tabletops and how design techniques impact groupware that involves tabletops.
Traditional Territoriality
Any collaborative human work project involves territoriality and investigating how people interact on traditional tables, doing specific or general tasks, is a good source of theories to describe how they will interact with more modern tabletop applications. In the paper "Territoriality in Collaborative Tabletop Workspaces" the researchers studies a large group (n=18) interacting while playing various boardgames. They found people would opportunistically use the space made available for them, which is consistent with common sense expectations. The participants also seemed to partition an area 'for themselves' which would be expected as well. In another study they asked three groups to layout a room plan which is a more cognitively challenging task. They found that people divide these areas into storage areas, group territories and personal areas. They describe how these findings and some specific findings on how these interact should motivate designers of systems
Incorporating Tabletops into Groupware
In the last paper called "Three's Company", the researchers explored how tabletops could be incorporated into a groupware application, which had a shared work space (via the tables), video cameras to provide visual feedback of the other participators and audio feedback to aid communications. To communicate feedback on the tabletop itself, the internal cameras in the Surface were used to capture pictures of arm movements which were displayed semi-transparently. Using this setup the researchers evaluate the interaction of three spaces, person space, task space and reference space. In the first study they tried two configurations for three person interaction, same side and around-the-table. From this they found that each configuration has different advantages - basically that users seem to prefer same side but that that approach sometimes leads to confusion as the different arm shadows occlude each other. In the second study they used a orientation-free task and concluded that people did not really use 'person space' and did not often glance at the users outside the communication phase of the work. Which makes sense as people would likely be looking down and away from the cameras (or the people) if they were working together in real life.
When constructing applications that attempt to mimic or replace physical interactions, certain key properties of the activity are often lost. To minimize this we try to mimic the physical interactions closely, for example, many of the interaction styles on tabletops mimic interfaces that might exist in physical form. But when this copying is done we must observe carefully the physical interactions and make sure key elements aren't missing. Studies like those above attempt to capture this information and communicate to the designer.s
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