CSAIL Event Calendar

Tabletop Displays and Remote Collaboration

Tabletop displays have become a popular research topic in recent years, partly because of the 'cool factor' and partly because horizontal direct-touch interfaces offer a different style of interaction from conventional computer interfaces. First I will describe my own work on creating a tabletop display. Then I will describe the issues that make tabletop interfaces different from conventional ones and which cause various assumptions implicit in conventional graphical user interfaces to be challenged, such as the assumption that there is only a single pointing device. Finally I will describe the project I am working on to link a tabletop display with handheld devices for synchronous communications within emergency response teams.

Speaker Bio:
Mark Ashdown is a research scientist in the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT where is is working on asymmetric remote collaboration for distributed teams. He is investigating the design of synchronous collaboration systems between a tabletop display in a command centre and handheld displays for mobile team members, particularly in an emergency response scenario. He is funded by a European Union Marie Curie Fellowship. He previously obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge Computer Lab in the UK in 2004, for creating a novel tabletop system called Escritoire. He was a postdoc in the University of Tokyo, Japan, from 2004 to 2006, working on geometric and photometric calibration for projectors. More information is available at http://mark.ashdown.name.

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