Shared Infrastructures for Tangible Tabletops & Interactive Surfaces

Although interactive surfaces have been a constant topic of research during the last decades, there is still little agreement on shared infrastructures for their conception and development. While the mainstream industry has already partially integrated basic multi-touch functionality in most mobile and some desktop platforms, any further attempts of introducing commercial table-tops have been largely abandoned since. Therefore our research community that seeks to conceive and implement novel interactive tabletop concepts, often relies on the prototyping of individualized solutions or the integration and extension of openly shared community solutions. One example of such a shared ecosystem is the TUIO protocol which has been designed to encode and transport a low-level interface abstraction within a wide variety of settings, from tangible user interfaces to multi-touch tabletops. However, our community also needs further implementations of common middle-ware solutions such as gesture-recognition or object classification as well as their integration into high-level development frameworks. Furthermore it would be also desirable to establish a shared collection of building-blocks at the hardware-level. Such a common ecosystem may not only accelerate the development efforts of our community, but should also ensure the scientific quality control through reproducible and comparable results.