projects

Tabletops in the Wild

Visitor Experiences with Multi-Touch Tables in Exhibition Spaces

To investigate how visitors explore and experience large horizontal multi-touch tables as part of public exhibition spaces, I conducted a study at the Canada's Arctic exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium. The exhibit features two interactive digital tables: the Collection Viewer and the Arctic Choices table. The study investigated visitors’ use and experience of the two different tabletop applications. The Collection Viewer table evoked visitors' curiosity by presenting visually interesting information and engaged by supporting lightweight, playful, and open-ended information exploration. The Arctic Choices table enabled visitors to explore a variety of information about environmental and political changes within the Arctic in depth by providing detailed data visualizations. For more information about the study findings, please refer to the publications listed below.

Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale. Making Sense of Wild Data: Using Visualization to Analyze In-the-Wild Video Records. In Research in the Wild workshop, DIS'12, 2012. http://www.researchinthewild.org.
Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale. Interactive Tables in the Wild - Visitor Experiences with Multi-Touch Tables in the Arctic Exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium. Technical Report 2010-973-22, University of Calgary, 2010.
Uta Hinrichs and Sheelagh Carpendale. Gestures in the Wild: Studying Multi-Touch Gesture Sequences on Interactive Tabletop Exhibits. In CHI'11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 3023-3032, May, 2011.