Open Collections

Exploring the design space for concurrent use of personal and large displays for in-home collaboration

University of British Columbia

Recent technology improvements have led to two trends - larger display screens in the home and more personal computing devices (with displays) being used in the home. We believe these two trends will converge. We want to understand the implications and possibilities of using a large shared display in combination with a small personal display for a variety of in-home applications. This thesis addresses three questions. First, can multiple users work on loosely coupled tasks on a single shared large display? Second, if users are able to work in parallel on a single display, what is the impact of adding a personal display to the large shared display for collaborative tasks? Finally, for those applications that utilize a small personal display and a large display, how difficult is it for users to switch their attention between the displays? We completed a pilot study, a main study and a follow-up study to answer these questions. Subsequently we utilized the results to design and develop the Family Blog, a collaborative application using mobile phones and a large shared display. The results from our pilot study show that users are able to share a large display for loosely coupled tasks and suggest that personally relevant objects should be placed together relative to a user's seated position. Our main study demonstrates that users are able to use both a personal display and a large display for varying levels of coupling for different tasks, but each task should utilize a single display for the majority of the task activity, and that viewing and selecting media and completing collaborative tasks should be done on the shared large display rather the personal display. The results from our follow-up study indicate that while using both a personal and large display, users are able to switch their attention between the two displays without difficulty. Based on these findings, we built an application, the Family Blog that allows users to create photos, video, text, and audio files on a mobile phone, and then upload them to create a video blog of the shared photos on the large display. The Family Blog utilizes and validates our results and design guidelines from the studies.

Text

2011-02-18

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31546

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

Graduate