An Evaluation of Hybrid Stacking on Interactive Tabletops

Jan Riemann, Florian Müller, Sebastian Günther, Max Mühlhäuser

SmartObjects 2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

TL;DR

What we did: We built an integrated hybrid tabletop system called StackTop that enables true hybrid stacking of digital and physical documents.

What we found: We found that users easily adopted their natural stacking practices in this hybrid environment, demonstrating positive engagement with the concept of hybrid stacking.

Takeaway: Our research offers valuable insights for designing future hybrid tabletop systems, emphasizing the need for intuitive interactions and user-driven functionalities that align with user expectations of physical document handling.

Abstract

Stacking is a common practice of organizing documents in the physical world. With the recent advent of interactive tabletops, physical documents can now coexist with digital documents on the same surface. As a result, systems were developed and studied which allow piling of both types of documents with the physical documents being placed on top of the digital ones. In this paper, we study the concept of true hybrid stacking, allowing users to stack both types of documents in an arbitrary order using a hybrid tabletop system called StackTop. We discuss the results and derive implications for future hybrid tabletop systems with stacking support.