Tabletop sharing of digital photographs for the elderly

Abstract

We have recently begun to see hardware support for the tabletop user interface, offering a number of new ways for humans to interact with computers. Tabletops offer great potential for face-to-face social interaction; advances in touch technology and computer graphics provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects, which we can display on the tabletop surface. Such an interface has the potential to benefit a wide range of the population and it is important that we design for usability and learnability with diverse groups of people.This paper describes the design of SharePic -a multiuser, multi-touch, gestural, collaborative digital photograph sharing application for a tabletop -and our evaluation with both young adult and elderly user groups. We describe the guidelines we have developed for the design of tabletop interfaces for a range of adult users, including elders, and the user interface we have built based on them. Novel aspects of the interface include a design strongly influenced by the metaphor of physical photographs placed on the table with interaction techniques designed to be easy to learn and easy to remember. In our evaluation, we gave users the final task of creating a digital postcard from a collage of photographs and performed a realistic think-aloud with pairs of novice participants learning together, from a tutorial script.

Subtle and Personal Workspace Requirements for Visual Search Tasks on Public Displays

“…Toney and Thomas [15] explored the 'reach envelope' over a tabletop display with an anthropometrically representative group of female users, and report that most interactions were constrained to a 12 × 34 cm region in front of a user. These regions are consistent with other work on tabletop displays (e.g., [1,12]). While issues such as 'crowding' have frequently been identified as design considerations (e.g., [11,12]), specific guidance towards how a display should respond to an approaching user has not yet been explored in the literature.…”

Funky-Design-Spaces: Interactive Environments for Creativity Inspired by Observing Designers Making Mood Boards

“…The Personal Digital Historian [21] is a tabletop penbased system that helps people construct, organize, navigate and share digital collections in an interactive multi-person conversational setting. SharePic [1] is a multitouch, gestural, and collaborative digital photograph sharing application for a tabletop, which was strongly influenced by the way physical photographs are handled and placed on physical tables. Cabinet [12] helps designers collect and organize visual material for inspiration.…”

Flux: Enhancing Photo Organization through Interaction and Automation

“…Two examples for a physical metaphor in computer interfaces are [7] and [8], the former in easing the inhibitions of senior citizens in working with digital photos and the latter in enriching the classical desktop metaphor with physical objects. Flux takes ideas from these examples and tries to provide a convenient environment to work with a personal photo collection.…”

“…Three geometric transformations are merged into two gestures: "Rotate'n'Translate" ( [11]) rotates an object with a pseudo-physical friction while the user drags it with one finger. "Rotate'n'Scale" ( [7]) lets the user set an object's scale with the distance of two fingers and its rotation with their movement. Except for changing appearances, these transformations can be used to delete photos and workspaces by scaling them below a certain threshold and unfolding piles by moving their topmost photo.…”