Technologies to support human-human collaboration have always been a hot topic for computer science. Meetings in particular represent a stimulating scenario since they are a common, yet at the same time problematic, human activity. The list of published works on remote meetings is so long to discourage any attempt to synthesis and only recentely, the emergence of hardware able to support, at least partially, several simultaneous users raised the interest in technologies to support face-to-face collaboration.
The goal of this activity is to investigate a new generation of human-computer interaction which is designed for group use
rather than for a personal use. This kind of interfaces should support or even foster collaboration by taking into account the social practiceses. New issues are emerging as, for example, the spatial organization of the information on shared surfaces and
the role of orientation. Coming to social aspects, social protocols and coordination policies in accessing shared surfaces have been also considered as important aspect that must be addressed while designing co-located interfaces. Finally, the way people interact plays an important
roles, for example, horizontal interfaces are more effective than vertical ones in promoting group cooperation and in e
ncouraging participant to switch between roles and to explore ideas.
We have experimented with several shared interfaces in different domains. In a setting of cooperative learning activities for children, we discussed the introduction of a new GUI event system that allows the use of real multi-user actions like multi-user touches and multi-user drag-and-drop (Cappelletti et al. 2004). Recentely we investigated the role of ownership and ownership markers (Wang et al. 2006) in a shared co-located space.
In the context of the European-funded CHIL project, we implemented the Collaborative Workspace a face-to-face application to support meetings. This application is developed using the Collaborative Workspace Framework, a toolkit based on the new Microsoft Vista technology (in particular the WinFX component) for the development of robust horizontal interfaces.