Extending tabletops to support flexible collaborative interactions

Tabletops have been used to support a range of colocated activities, from games to image sorting. However, their limited display space and resolution can restrict the kinds of collaborative interactions that take place. Our research is concerned with how to extend the tabletop by integrating it with other spaces and artifacts in the physical world. Our goal is to design workspaces that support a wider range of collaborative tasks, determining which are well suited to the tabletop and which are better performed using physical representations and spaces. We describe a physical digital space that we built for this purpose and then a study that compared how groups collaborate on a design task when using this versus solely the tabletop. The findings showed that extending the tabletop into a physical space enabled groups to collaborate more easily and flexibly.