From Tabletops to Multi-Tablet Environments in Educational Scenarios: A Lightweight and Inexpensive Alternative

Toward a General Conceptualization of Multi-Display Environments

“…Regular-shaped MDEs usually are for the purpose of extending the visualization space and often present the typical rectangular form of a planar single screen Bardram et al, 2010), or the classic "L" shape of heterogeneous environments with a wall screen next to a tabletop . Irregular shapes, on the other hand, allow flexible configurations where the users can place the surfaces arbitrarily, and are present in many environments involving mobile devices that are not aimed at extending the visualization space, since they can be moved around and placed wherever the user pleases (Mandryk et al, 2001;Iwai and Sato, 2009); or in environments with a mechanism to track all the surfaces in real time (Rekimoto and Saitoh, 1999;Maciel et al, 2010;Garcia-Sanjuan et al, 2016b), so that all of them can maintain the coupling regardless of where they are placed. There are other examples of MDEs with irregular shapes that do try to extend the visualization space and rely on proximity sensors to keep the devices coupled (Goh et al, 2012;Ohta and Tanaka, 2012).…”

“…In our opinion, performing the interface distribution is a secondary step after performing the coupling between the devices; hence, combining the previous classifications, we classify the different ways of establishing the coupling into four broad categories, depending on the degree of involvement of the user: implicit, manual, assisted, and automatic. An implicit creation of the coupling means that the devices are completely unaware of one another, but the activity being carried out involves working with several surfaces at the same time as if they were exchanging information (Yuill et al, 2013;Garcia-Sanjuan et al, 2015b), hence, it is a sort of coupling that do not involve any link whatsoever among the surfaces but still provides the illusion of being connected; manual creation requires the user to explicitly set which devices are going to be part of the environment and where they are going to be located in the physical space (Grudin, 2001;Lyons et al, 2006); an assisted one also requires the action of the user, but they are only required to perform a gesture indicating they want to couple two or more devices together Hunter et al, 2010); and, finally, an automatic creation is completely transparent to the user and relies on a discovery service to determine which devices should be coupled (Maciel et al, 2010;Marquardt et al, 2012;Garcia-Sanjuan et al, 2016b). Whereas the first and the last methods may be more comfortable for the user, the other two involve a component of intentionality that can be useful in some contexts.…”

“…This definition is similar to the "fixed" coupling from Terrenghi et al (2009), in which "displays are tightly connected but do not allow any dynamic configuration or easy re-configuration. " In contrast, a dynamic coupling allows for more freedom of movements since users can change the devices and/or move them around (Tan et al, 2004;Garcia-Sanjuan et al, 2016b), and it is similar to what Gjerlufsen et al (2011) call "flexibility, " to the "continuous distribution" from Luyten and Coninx (2005), or the "fluid-middle" and "loose" coupling from Terrenghi et al (2009). Dynamic coupling implies an irregular shape, because being able to move surfaces within the environment inevitably changes the shape of the topology of the surfaces.…”