MultiSpace: enabling electronic document micro-mobility in table-centric, multi-device environments

Although electronic media has changed how people interact with documents, today's electronic documents and the environments in which they are used are still impoverished relative to traditional paper documents when used by groups of people and across multiple computing devices. Vertical interfaces (e.g., walls and monitors) afford a less democratic style of interaction than generally observed when people are working around a table. In this paper, we introduce MultiSpace, a research effort which explores the role of the table as a central hub to support ad hoc collaboration in a multidevice environment. The table centric approach offers new interaction techniques to provide egalitarian access and shared transport of data, supporting mobility and micromobility (Luff and Heath, 1998) of electronic content between tables and other devices. Our observations show how people use these techniques, and how tabletop technology can support and augment collaborative tasks.