Eva Hornecker visits

Last week Eva Hornecker visited our lab to have a chat about collaborating and to have a look at what's going on here in Newcastle. She also gave a talk, which presented some interesting (and somewhat unexpected) results from a study on collocated collaboration around a tabletop system. Specifically, the study looked at the impact of input devices (single mouse vs. multiple mice vs. single touch vs. multitouch) on people's awareness of what other people were doing. One of the key findings (in my eyes) was that although there might be more instances of people interfering with one another using multitouch interaction, they were able to very quickly recover from it, which might be (at least partially) due to increased awareness in this condition. They published a paper on this study at CSCW last year.