Design Requirements and Methodologies for Multi-Display Environments

Members Involved:

• Jim Wallace
• Stacey Scott

As technology continues to evolve we are seeing the development and introduction of ever-specialized devices. Personal devices like smart phones, iPods and iPads, netbooks and laptops are making technology more personal and mobile. Large screen technologies like projectors, plasma displays, and interactive surfaces like Microsoft Surface and SMART Tables provide spaces that people can gather around to share information. The CSL Lab is interested in discovering new ways of integrating these new technologies to support groups working together on shared projects.

The applications of this research are broad in scope. For example, a group of friends might play board games at home using a shared tabletop display and their favourite portable gaming console. Alternatively, this research may be used to help design naval applications that coordinate sensor data from officers working at different sensor stations.

In particular, we are interested in developing design requirements, guidelines, interaction techniques and methodologies for the study of these environments. Our goal is to understand what general system requirements might be, how users should be able to interact with their data and each other, and after a system is built, how to evaluate it and identify areas for improvement.