Design and evaluation of distributed user interfaces between tangible tabletops

Abstract

The advantage of tangible interaction is that it allows people to interact naturally. Tabletops are a collective support which can be used by several people simultaneously. In previous work, tabletop and tangible interaction were shown to be of interest in the learning process; the previous application was based on a classification task helping very young children in the recognition and learning of colors on one tabletop. This paper concerns distribution between connected tabletops. In order to provide a supervision tool in our case, this paper proposes more generally to distribute user interfaces between interactive tabletops which use tangible interaction. A design model is proposed for this type of system and is applied to design a distributed application for children and a supervisor on two interactive tabletops. An evaluation, with twelve test groups, each composed of three participants, has involved a distributed application for the learning and recognition of colors. This study is supported by observations, trace analysis and questionnaires. In the study, we analyze if design choices, guided by the model and providing generic objects, allow the users to interact remotely, easily and understandably. The user satisfaction when using the distributed tangible tabletops is also studied. After the discussion, a conclusion and future works are proposed.