Collaborative Design in a Multi-Touch Environment Using Virtual and Real Objects
January 31, 2010
Microsoft's Surface is capable of recognizing items placed onto the tabletop, but with Pictionaire -- a project from Microsoft Research and the University of California, Berkeley -- digital media and common everyday objects found in a designer's arsenal are combined in a way that promises to innovate new ways of productivity-based collaboration in multi-touch environments.
Pictionaire (yes, it's a silly name) promises a system for design teams that introduces interactions for capturing physical artifacts and organizing their digital copies with functionality for retrieval and annotation. It enables multiple designers to fluidly move imagery from the physical to the digital realm; work with found, drawn and captured imagery; organize items into functional collections; and record meeting histories.
The setup is not much different than most large projection style multi-touch tables, and in fact the rig is rather simple and looks like something you might find over at Instructables.
But the key feature here is a high resolution still camera suspended a couple of meters above the surface. The camera takes shots of objects such as magazines, books, sketch pads and white boards and digitizes the content. Once the item is removed from the table it is replaced by the digital version. This allows notes, photos and other items to be captured and then shared in the collaborative environment like any other piece of digital media. It even allows the digitized media to be overlaid onto real paper, notepads or white boards so it can be annotated or marked up.
Additionally, the table recognizes input devices placed on the surface such as wireless keyboards, mice and pen-based tablets.
When a keyboard is placed on the table, a text box appears, allowing the operator to write, notate the media, and add text to other people's documents. Digital objects can be "linked" to keyboards by simply pointing and clicking with a mouse, and two keyboards, when brought into close proximity to one another, allows the operators to share the document being created.
Check out the vid.
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