Improving digital handoff in shared tabletop workspaces

Handoff of objects and tools occurs frequently and naturally in face-to-face work; in tabletop groupware, however, digital handoff is often awkward. In this paper, we investigate ways of improving support for digital handoff in tabletop systems. We first observed how handoff works at a physical table, and then compared the performance of tangible and standard transfer techniques on digital tables. Based on our observations, we developed a new technique called force-field handoff that allows objects to drift between pointers that are approaching one another. We tested force-field handoff in an experiment, and found that it is significantly faster than current digital handoff; no difference was found with tangible handoff. In addition, force-field handoff was preferred by the majority of participants.