SketchTop shows that multi-touch tabletop interfaces are at least as useful for interdisciplinary design collaboration as traditional pen and paper as well as investigates some of the opportunities they provide for augmenting this process.
The SketchTop application takes pen and paper sketching as its interaction metaphor. It provides resizable, rotatable pages that users edit using infrared pens. Canvases are manipulated using the handles on the corners. Moving one corner drags the canvas. Moving two corners simultaneously resizes, rotates and moves the canvas. By holding two corners and dragging a third, users can copy a canvas, to iterate or share a design.
Based on background research showing that collaboration tends to produce better results and that tabletops, through the appropriate application of interaction design, can support group work, we developed a set of requirements for the SketchTop application, which we then tested and refined during multiple rounds of paper-based pilot tests. Prior research on collaboration has shown that support of personal and shared territories, equitable access to input devices and flexible orientation of interface elements is important to collaborative work on tabletops. Our design iterations, shown in the images above from newest to oldest, sought different ways to support the requirements, which eventually led to the final design. See the TEI Paper and the Design Document for more detailed analysis of the design process and the user studies.