Synthesis

Suturing Space: Extended Abstract, HCI International 2015

Typically video-conferencing technologies focus on provide 1-1, person to person links, usually showing the heads and shoulders of the speakers seated facing their cameras. This limits their movement and expects foveal attention. Adding people to the conversation multiplies the complexity and competes for visual real estate and video bandwidth. Most coronal meaning-making activity is excised by this frontal framing of the participants. This method does not scale well as the number of participants rises.

In our approach to augmenting collaboration and learning, we take a different tack. Instead of projecting people to remote spaces, we make furniture and objects that effectively exist in two (or more) locations at once. We ask, how can such shared objects provide a common site for ad hoc activity in concurrent conversations among people who are not co-located but co-present via audio?

We entirely side-step the problems of representing people, tracking gaze and focusing cameras or microphones etc. by focusing attention on a common table and not people’s faces.

Our Table of Content (TOC) uses tables mated with two way, continuous live-video. Each table has a projector and a camera beaming down onto the surface of the table. Objects placed on one table appear projected on the other. This focuses attention on what is being discussed and on a common tabletop on which props, diagrams and simple gestures can be used with ad hoc freedom. (Should the collaborators wish to see their remote counterparts, they can add a standard technology like Skype.) We provide an omni-directional microphone and good speakers so that people can speak at any time in the flow of conversation without having the overhead of human gaze tracking. Most importanly, bypassing telephones’ noise suppression logic allows people to hear remote ancillary sounds while one is speaking. This conveys everyone’s presence and enables ad hoc concurrent engagement.

We emphasize the design metaphor that the TOC is furniture existing in two or more places at once. It is not a “communication channel” that requires dial-up protocols for initiating or terminating a device. Just as a table does not need to be “turned on” before people gather around it, the TOC is engineered to run continuously so that people can gather around it and start using it at any time. We leverage all the existing social and technical protocols people use to get together around, and for sharing a table. Rather than treat collaboration as a telecommunication problem, we build furniture as sites of common activity.

The video (Montpellier 2014) shows how this technology works. We implemented our common table in our labs in Montreal and Phoenix to serve several series of seminars. The seminars vary in format between round-the-table verbal discussions and single- speaker presentations.

Aside from the engineering problems, some of the questions we address with this platform include:

• How should people coordinate and interleave their interventions using tokens, gesture, vocal signals, etc.?

• How can we handle time zone differences: three hours between Montreal and Phoenix, 8 or 9 hours between Phoenix and London or Athens?

• How do people mix live events with recorded audio, video or documents?

• How do people mix the table with “foveal” media such as the talking-heads videos of remote interlocutors?

Antecedents 

Video-walls (Johanson 2004, Abel 1990, Fish 1990), and shared displays for collaborative work have a long history going back at least to Xerox PARC’s work in the 1980’s. In particular, tabletop displays engineered with various functions have enjoyed several waves of attention (Müller-Tomfelde 2010, Tuddenham 2009, Pauchet 2007, Bekins 2006, Poupyrev 2001; Microsoft Research Lab, Rekimoto Lab Tokyo). This combines mixed reality (Costanza 2009, Ehnes 2009, Verlinden 2006) and studies of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), ubiquitous computing and place (Greenberg 1989, Harrison 1996, Ekman 2013, Fitzpatrick 2003, Gaver 1992, Gaver et al. 1992). Our emphasis to un-mark the shared surface and de-escalate it as much as possible to a tabletop that is not to be taken as computer technology to support specific genres of activity, but as generic furniture that ties two parts of the world together. We call this technique for conditioning spatial experience, suturing.

Implications for interaction design

We rethink the process and methodology of designing for shared spaces. Rather than fixing on tele-projecting people or transporting things and data objects from location to location, we think of a single place that exists in two locations. We call this technique suturing borrowing consciously from topology. There is no need for mated objects be the same size or shape so long as symbolic and social activity coordinate those objects. Just as in topology one can suture two manifolds together by a “gluing map” that identifies dissimilar shapes, designers can identify objects that are quite different.

Le Petit Chef

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkCSy_SQX28

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYEyyemm4lM