With the proliferation of large multi-faceted datasets, a critical question is how to design collaborative environments, in which this data can be analysed in an efficient and insightful manner. Exploiting people’s movements and distance to the data display and to collaborators, proxemic interactions can potentially support such scenarios in a fluid and seamless way, supporting both tightly coupled collaboration as well as parallel explorations. With SpiderEyes, we introduce the concept of collaborative proxemics: enabling groups of people to collaboratively use attention- and proximity-aware applications. To help designers create such applications we have developed SpiderEyes: a system and toolkit for designing attention- and proximity-aware collaborative interfaces for wall-sized dis- plays. SpiderEyes is based on low-cost technology and allows accurate markerless attention-aware tracking of multiple people interacting in front of a display in real time.
A video showcasing some of the functionality can be found on youtube: http://youtu.be/uNJZ63lKUFA
This work has been presented at IUI 2014 in Haifa, Israel.
The toolkit consists of two parts – a tracking system that exposes the data and a JavaScript core that processes the data for use in web-based visualisations.
The toolkit will be available for download shortly.