Rapidly Prototyping Single Display Groupware through the SDGToolkit

Researchers in Single Display Groupware (SDG) explore how multiple users share a single display such as a computer monitor, a large wall display, or an electronic tabletop display. Yet today's personal computers are designed with the assumption that one person interacts with the display at a time. Thus researchers and programmers face considerable hurdles if they wish to develop SDG. Our solution is the SDGToolkit, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping SDG. SDGToolkit automatically captures and manages multiple mice and keyboards, and presents them to the programmer as uniquely identified input events relative to either the whole screen or a particular window. It transparently provides multiple cursors, one for each mouse. To handle orientation issues for tabletop displays (i.e., people seated across from one another), programmers can specify a participant's seating angle, which automatically rotates the cursor and translates input coordinates so the mouse behaves correctly. Fin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: AUIC
• Authors: Edward Tse, Saul Greenberg
• Keywords: AUIC 2004, Single Display, Single Display Groupware, Software Engineering, Tabletop Displays