Proximity Table: Exploring Tabletop Interfaces that Respond to Body Position and Motion

Abstract

This thesis presents the ProximityTable framework, an interactive tabletop system that uses a top-down tracker to track users around the display. Based on this tracking data it generates a number of proxemics events that can be used by developers to generate application-based responses. The main goal of this thesis is to apply Hall’s proxemics theory to the design of interactive tabletops in order to support the work of multiple groups around a single interactive tabletop display. A set of proxemics-based interactions were designed using the core features of ProximityTable, and evaluated in three focus group sessions. From our evaluation, we found that the majority of our participants also agreed that adapting the workspace according to group size allows for better interaction with the display, where users can directly interact with the display or have a better view of the contents in the workspace. Even when the majority of our participants chose to work on joined workspaces, there were some instances where they split the workspace in the middle of the task to complete tasks in parallel. We also found that users preferred to have a balance between user and system control, which will allow them to have manual control of the responses to proxemics events that is supported by system’s detection.