Bridging physical and electronic media for distributed design collaboration

Research on distributed collaboration has predominantly focused on shared electronic media. We have found, as other researchers have, that users often have good reason to want to work with physical media. Yet they would still like to collaborate with each other. A fundamental tension exists in the design of systems to support remote collaboration when the interaction primitives are physical: physical objects live in one place. We have designed and implemented a remote collaboration system where users can still use physical objects. We introduce an interaction paradigm where objects that are physical in one space are electronic in the other space, and vice versa. Our distributed system is designed for two groups, with multiple users at each end. Our tangible approach is the first system to enable simultaneous, multi-input across locations. We have implemented this system as an extension to the Designers' Outpost[5].