Augmented tabletops, an incentive for distributed collaboration

Global distribution of design teams is a reality for all major industries. This new organization challenges the traditional strong collaborative practices of designers. The meeting spaces must support a variety of intermediary objects that make the traditional tools, such as whiteboards, inappropriate, especially for distributed teams, and call for more relevant artifacts. Based on a distributed learning project, we investigated the use of augmented tabletops as practical surfaces to share information during distributed design working sessions. In this empirical study, we describe the specifications and functionalities of the AugmenTables prototypes designed by the student teams. This paper then evaluates the technical and social impact of augmented tabletops during virtual meetings and especially informal design reviews.