Data handling displays

Abstract

Imagine a world in which people can use their hand-held mobile devices to project and transfer content. Everyone can join the collaboration by simply bringing their mobile devices close to each other. People can grab data from each others' devices with simple hand gestures. Now imagine a large display created by tiling multiple displays where multiple users can interact with a large dynamically changing data set in a collocated, collaborative setting and the displays will take care of the data transfer and handling functions in a way that is transparent to the users. In this paper we present a novel data-handling display which works as not only a display device but also as an interaction and data transfer module. We propose simple gesture based solutions to transfer information between these data-handling modules. We achieve high scalability by presenting a fully distributed architecture in which each device is responsible for its own data and also communicates and collaborates with other devices. We also show the usefulness of our work in visualizing large datasets and at the same time allowing multiple users to interact with the data.