Identity-Differentiating Widgets for Multiuser Interactive Surfaces

Widgets—standard reusable GUI elements—are a staple of user-interface development. The use of widget toolkits, such as Java’s Swing, X Window System’s Motif, or Microsoft’s MFC, allows programmers to quickly incorporate a number of standard interactions (such as clicking buttons, selecting check boxes, or scrolling through lists) into their software. To date, most widgets have been designed for use by one person at a time. Within a single session, a widget will behave the same regardless of who uses it. However, traditional single-user widgets don’t support cooperative work systems with multiple users.

Pebbles and The MultiDevice Multi-User Multi-Editor (MMM) were two of the first systems to extend widgets for computer-supported cooperative work. They extended the visual representations of widgets to distinguish among users in shared-display settings. In a short paper published at Interact-2005, we introduced the notion of identity-differentiating widgets (iDwidgets) for collaborative settings. iDwidgets extend the widget concept by including identity as an input parameter, which lets us customize interactions in a variety of ways. In that paper, we presented a few hypothetical examples to illustrate the concept.

Here we expand the iDwidget presentation, providing example implementations of iDwidgets from each of four categories—function, content, appearance, and group input—that we can customize by identity differentiation. We have incorporated these sample widgets into several tabletop groupware systems across a number of domains and usage scenarios. By providing multiple, concrete examples of iDwidgets in action, we hope to show the utility of the conceptual framework, and
provide other application developers with ideas for exploiting identity in tabletop and other group settings.