Erika Martinez (CCADET - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)
The Interactive Augmented Desk: A Novel Technology to Support CollaborationFriday 25 May 2007 (week 6)
In contrast to the approach looking at improving just collaboration on-line, this talk describes a novel technology that aims to support both the sharing of on-line and face-to-face collaborative tasks between multiple users. By means of augmented reality techniques, the members of a team can share a common working area projected on a desk while keeping individual working spaces. The shared space is intended to be the zone where multi-user editors are presented, so participants can work together in the same task, whereas the individual areas have been designated for each participant's tablet PC.
A main aim of this work is to evaluate the impact that shared control of the session has on the working team. When students work together on one computer, one of them controls the mouse and the keyboard at a time, whereas the rest can only verbalize their ideas. Among the attempts to improve the control sharing between the members of the team, we propose the use of the Interactive Augmented Desk (IAD), where all of the students have the opportunity to work in parallel to complete a task. However, we acknowledge that it is possible for the students to end up cooperating or working on their own rather than collaborating. Nevertheless, we believe that if the task is carefully designed to require students' collaboration, it is more likely for students to show this behaviour.
So, our research question relates to how the students' interaction and learning are affected when using the IAD to complete a collaborative task.