Digital Studio

INTERACTIVE PROJECTIONS

If today computer support has been accepted as an useful tool of interaction due to its easy handling and availability, it’s a matter of fact that collaboration in group work don’t take a real advantage of this technology. Usually in a group work environment, “face-to-face” collaboration turns to the use of traditional media and forms of interaction.

This basic approach of collaboration has the major disadvantage to force actors to communicate and interact with dedicated computer systems instead of assisting them through collaborative environments. The architecture of a collaborative environment could be represented as physical space (like a room, building, etc…) providing intuitive interaction due to a ubiquitous computer infrastructure.

Interactive walls, also known as interactive screens, are considered as a new computing medium offering to group workers another approach of collaboration, increasing effectiveness through large interactive and touchable displays.

The main definition of an interactive wall is a very large, highresolution display which can be touch-sensitive. The content displayed on these interactive screens is generally the same that could be found on a desktop computer but magnified onto a larger area.

The “touch” functionality may be extremely reduced to standard elements (like buttons, images, links, etc…) or extended to a complete user control. In this case, user is able to interact with the wall by accomplishing dynamic actions.

The second inherent definition is to consider an interactive wall as a collaborative tool due to the fact that it moves the interaction space from the desktop to a wall. This use case requires that the content has been specially designed to take advantage of large interactive displays.