Portable Personal Displays for Co-Located Collaboration with Limited Screen Space

Abstract

This video presents a new technique for mobile and ad-hoc co-located collaboration with an arbitrary number of users. Our approach is based on tracking of personal displays that share the same information space. All displays involved in the collaboration act as autonomous windows on a set of data items (the information space) positioned on a shared virtual canvas. Data items are identified by their three-dimensional location in physical space and can be manipulated through the displays that serve as windows on the shared canvas. Each display is tracked by a location positioning device and is aware of its own location in space. Since different displays access the same information space, a specialized distributed locking mechanism makes sure the data stays consistent during simultaneous access of data in this information space. The approach presented in this video enables people to set up ad-hoc collaborations using mobile devices while avoiding the problem of a small screen space typical for these kinds of set