The PPD 08 Workshop on designing multi-touch interaction techniques for coupled public and private displays focuses on the research challenges and opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small private input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. Different touch-enabled devices rely on different types of touches (passive stylus, active stylus, fingers and tangible objects), the motivating question for this workshop is how do users switch between these devices and how to facilitate fluid transition from a collection of multiple displays to a single integrated multi-display environment.
Recent developments have seen the wide spread proliferation of both large shared displays and small display technologies. In parallel we have seen the emergence of new classes of device which support both touch or multi touch interaction. Examples of small touch driven devices include PDAs, Tablets and iPhones and examples of large interactive surfaces (multi-touch driven displays) include the Diamondtouch and Surface Computing. Interactive surfaces offer great potential for face-to-face work and social interaction and provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects whereas small devices afford the individual a personal workspace or “scratch space” to formulate ideas before bringing them to a wider audience. Advanced visual interfaces can be built around a combination of both private and public touch driven displays. Such computer mediated multi-device interaction between local touch-driven displays and shared public ones presents a number of novel and challenging research problems.
Our aim with this workshop will be to focus on the research challenges in designing touch interaction techniques for the combination of small touch driven private input displays such as iPhones coupled with large touch driven public displays such as the Diamondtouch or Microsoft Surface.
