Summary

On the one hand, multitouch tables are perceived as pioneers of a wave of new, 'natural' user interfaces. On the other hand, they are seldom deployed in practice, and only in a few application areas. The talk shows advantages and limits of the technology based on our practical experiences in two very different domains. In museums, visitors expect entertaining exhibits which are easy to understand and capture their attention for a limited amount of time. In contrast, educational contexts pose very different challenges: Perceptual and didactic issues become important; complexity of the applications and duration of use are a lot higher. The talk identifies the technological and creative issues involved and gives an introduction to the practical work involved.

Vita

Dipl. Inf. Ulrich von Zadow is a software developer and researcher at Archimedes Exhibitions GmbH. His current responsibilities include project management for the SimMed project and maintaining the media development framework libavg (www.libavg.de). Before this, Ulrich von Zadow established and led the software development at Archimedes from 2007-2010. In the years 2001-2007, he worked at ART+COM. Past projects he has managed include the mixed-reality telescope timescope (www.timescope.de) and the interactive surface Archimedes SessionDesk. He regularly holds seminars at the Saarland University.