Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multiuser tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in realistic tasks.

Developing for tabletops puts special requirements on interface programming frameworks: managing parallel input, device discovery, device equivalence, and describing combined interactions. We analyse these issues and describe the solutions that were used in IntuiKit, a modelbased framework aimed at making the design and development of post-WIMP user interfaces more accessible. Some solutions are simple consequences of the support of multimodality, while others are more specific to multiple touch. We illustrate these features through examples developed in several tabletop projects, including one application aimed at improving collaboration between air traffic controllers.

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