Abstract

Co-located collaborative web-browsing is a relatively common task and yet is poorly supported by conventional tools. Prior research in this area has focused on adapting conventional browsing interfaces to add collaboration support. Our research explores an alternative approach, by applying ideas from tabletop interfaces. We present WebSurface, a novel tabletop interface for collaborative web-browsing. WebSurface explores two design challenges of this approach: providing sufficient resolution for legible text; and navigating through information. We report our early experiences with an exploratory user study, in which pairs of collaborators gathered information using WebSurface. The findings suggest that a tabletop approach for collaborative webbrowsing can help address limitations of conventional tools, and presents beneficial affordances for information layout.