Enhancing Workspace Awareness on Collaborative Transparent Displays

Li, J., Greenberg, S. and Sharlin, E. (2014)
Enhancing Workspace Awareness on Collaborative Transparent Displays. Research report 2014-1065-16, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, October. Paper plus video, video duration 4:35.

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Abstract

Transparent displays can be used to support collaboration, where collaborators work on either side while simultaneously seeing what the other person is doing. This naturally supports workspace awareness: the up-to-the-moment understanding of another person's interaction with a shared workspace. The problem is that the transparency of such displays can change dynamically during a collaborative session, where it can degrade as a function of the density and brightness of the displayed graphics and changes in lighting. This compromises workspace awareness. Our solution is to track and graphically enhance a person's touch and gestural actions to make the feedthrough of those actions more visible on the other side. We had subjects perform three tasks over degrading transparency conditions, where augmentation techniques that enhance actions were either present or absent. Our analysis confirms that people's awareness is reduced as display transparency is compromised, and verifies that augmentation techniques can mitigate this awareness loss.

Keywords

Two-sided interactive transparent displays; workspace awareness, touch and gesture enhancement, CSCW

Bibtex entry

@TECHREPORT { 2014-TransparentStudy.Report2014-1065-16,
CLASS = { REPORT },
AUTHOR = { Li, J. and Greenberg, S. and Sharlin, E. },
TITLE = { Enhancing Workspace Awareness on Collaborative Transparent Displays },
YEAR = { 2014 },
MONTH = { October },
INSTITUTION = { Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary },
ADDRESS = { Calgary, Alberta, Canada },
PAGES = { 11 pages plus video figure },
NUMBER = { 2014-1065-16 },
KEYWORDS = { Two-sided interactive transparent displays; workspace awareness, touch and gesture enhancement, CSCW },
NOTE = { Paper plus video, video duration 4:35 },
}