Collaborative creativity is traditionally supported by formal techniques, such as brainstorming. These techniques improve the idea-generation process by creating group synergies, but also suffer from a number of negative effects [12]. Current electronic tools to support collaborative creativity overcome some of these problems, but introduce new ones, by either losing the benefits of face-to-face communication or the immediacy of simultaneous contribution.Using an interactive environment as a test bed, we are investigating how collaborative creativity can be supported electronically while maintaining face-to-face communication. What are the design-factors influencing such a system?We have designed a brainstorming application that uses an interactive table and a large wall display, and compared the results of using it to traditional paper-based brainstorming in a user study with 30 participants. From the considerations that went into the design and the observations during the study we derive a number of design guidelines for collaborative systems in interactive environments.

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Recent work in multi-touch tabletop interaction introduced many novel techniques that let people manipulate digital content through touch. Yet most only detect touch blobs. This ignores richer interactions that would be possible if we could identify (1) which hand, (2) which part of the hand, (3) which side of the hand, and (4) which person is actually touching the surface. Fiduciary-tagged gloves were previously introduced as a simple but reliable technique for providing this information. The problem is that its lowlevel programming model hinders the way developers could rapidly explore new kinds of user-and handpartaware interactions. We contribute the TOUCHID toolkit to solve this problem. It allows rapid prototyping of expressive multi-touch interactions that exploit the aforementioned characteristics of touch input. TOUCHID provides an easy-to-use event-driven API. It also provides higher-level tools that facilitate development: a glove configurator to rapidly associate particular glove parts to handparts; and a posture configurator and gesture configurator for registering new hand postures and gestures for the toolkit to recognize. We illustrate TOUCHID's expressiveness by showing how we developed a suite of techniques (which we consider a secondary contribution) that exploits knowledge of which handpart is touching the surface.

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In this paper we present a toolkit for realizing capacitive sensing applications for human-computer interaction in pervasive computing systems. We argue that capacitive sensors -due to their unique properties -are well suited for many pervasive and ubiquitous computing applications and scenarios. We describe the CapToolKit designed to rapidly realize prototypes and systems that are able to detect the presence of humans and objects. Our toolkit also allows the integration of 3D interaction with everyday objects as well as instrumented environments. We illustrate its capabilities by presenting several applications implemented using CapToolKit. The entire system will be open-sourced to allow utilization of our technology within other research projects. By building on the existing toolkit researchers are provided a foundation for developing their own sensor systems, algorithms, and applications.