Exploring the Possibilities of a Fully Fledged Web Surface for Vision Based Interactive Tabletops

Abstract

Vision based interactive tabletops open up a whole new iteraction paradigm for the people to interact with computers directly through human touch while the text input is now possible via a virtual keyboard or directly by writing with free hands. At the same time, it is also a very live device, responsive to any type of daytoday real world objects, including digital devices small enough to be kept on its horizontal large display, providing tangible type of interfaces as well. However, at the moment, all the rich user applications developed combining these unique interaction capabilities are limited to standalone software. Even though the access to web is already enabled in these systems, applications that can be accessed through a browser do not fully utilize or support the new interaction capabilities provided by the technology. This is due to that all the existing web applications developed up to now have been following the traditional WIMP GUI and the interaction limitations, imposed by the conventional desktop computing environment which is still the mainstream. In this thesis, we discuss the possiblities of a fully- edged web surface for vision based interactive tabletops by proposing a novel user interface model for the web sites to be redesigned to best suit levels of interactivity expected by vision based tabletop environments while talking about the realization aspects as well in terms of modern web development technologies. We hope that our work would ignite the world by making the starting point of a new versatile multi-user web browsing paradigm in the history of HCI.