In the real world, a physical tabletop provides public and private needs for people around the table. For competing scenarios such as playing a poker game or running a price negotiation around a tabletop system, privacy protection is obviously an indispensable requirement. In this work we developed a privacy-enhanced tabletop system composed of two kinds of displays, the tabletop surface and the virtual panel. All users share the large tabletop surface as a public display while every user is provided with a virtual panel emerging above the tabletop as a personal display for viewing private information. The virtual panel is an intangible, privacy-protected virtual screen created by a special optical mechanism which offers several promising characteristics, making it perfect to be integrated into a tabletop system. The contributions of the paper include: Firstly, we introduce a novel display technique, the virtual panel, into a tabletop system to build a privacy-enhanced tabletop system...