Personal clipboards for individual copy-and-paste on shared multi-user surfaces

Abstract

Clipboards are omnipresent on today's personal computing platforms. They provide copy-and-paste functionalities that let users easily reorganize information and quickly transfer data across applications. In this work, we introduce personal clipboards to multi-user surfaces. Personal clipboards enable individual and independent copy-and-paste operations, in the presence of multiple users concurrently sharing the same direct-touch interface. As common surface computing platforms do not distinguish touch input of different users, we have developed clipboards that leverage complementary personalization strategies. Specifically, we have built a context menu clipboard based on implicit user identification of every touch, a clipboard based on personal subareas dynamically placed on the surface, and a handheld clipboard based on integration of personal devices for surface interaction. In a user study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of personal clipboards for shared surfaces, and show that different personalization strategies enable clipboards, albeit with different impacts on interaction characteristics.

TDome

“…touch, tilt). Examples include the use of mobiles for pointing [22], for continuous map navigation [10,21], for copy-and-paste operations [30] or for interacting with distant 3D content [8]. The camera on the mobile device has been used to transfer data between MDE displays [11,13].…”

SleeD

“…More recently, significant work by Schmidt et al [26,27] examined cross-device interaction between phones and interactive surfaces. They proposed a collection of interaction techniques in areas such as data transfer, personalization, or localized feedback.…”

“…Numerous researchers have combined smartphones and other hand-held devices with shared displays in the past (e.g., [20,24,26,27,29]). This makes it possible to use the modalities -display output, touch input, sound and haptic feedbackavailable on the personal device to extend interaction with the large display.…”

MobiZone

“…Please note, however, that any other action can be performed on a selection of items. For instance, the user could cut items and store them, making the phone a personal clipboard as introduced by Schmidt et al [20].…”

“…As a result, it is not possible to automatically personalize applications on interactive surfaces efficiently. Therefore, many research efforts have been devoted to approaches for identifying users on interactive surfaces (e.g., [3,15,19,20]). …”