A framework for the development of multi-display environment applications supporting interactive real-time portals

Abstract

Advances in multi-touch enabled interactive tabletops led to many commercially available products and were increasingly deployed at places beyond research labs, for example at exhibitions, retail stores, or showrooms. At the same time, small multi-touch devices, such as tablets or smartphones, became prevalent in our daily life. When considering both trends, occasions and scenarios where tabletop systems and mobile devices form a coupled interaction space are expected to become increasingly widespread. However, application development or research prototypes for those environments will foreseeable require considerable resources when considering nowadays heterogeneity of device platforms and the functionality to establish a connected interaction space. To address these concerns, this paper discusses challenges and answers questions that arose during design and implementation of the Environs framework, a multi-display environment software framework that eases development of interactive distributed applications. In particular, Environs enables applications utilizing video portals that put high requirements on responsiveness and latency.