cBoard: A co-located single display collaborative smart whiteboard

Supervisors: Himanshu Verma, Denis Lalanne

Student: Moreno Colombo

Project status: Finished

Year: 2017

Collaborative work on large interactive walls can be improved not only by providing users with the possibility of creating personalized input, but also by making them more aware of their own and their collaborators' location and pose, associating them to their personalized tools and points of input.

In this thesis, we present a way of associating points of input on an interactive wall with the users who produced them, in such a way of providing user-aware input. To prevent possible erroneous associations of this system, we also provide users with \emph{virtual shadows}, making them more aware of theirs and their collaborators' position and pose.

We also present a user-study comparing the effects of the presence or absence of shadows on the user experience. Our results demonstrate significant reduction in the association errors with no perceived distraction effects of the shadows on the ongoing task. In addition, the presence of shadows increased the mean distance amongst users to further decrease the chances of erroneous interactions.

Keywords: Virtual shadows; user-touch association; interactive surfaces; co-located collaboration; interactive surfaces; multi-user interaction; error avoidance.

Document: report.pdf