Design and Development of a Distributed Tabletop System Using EBITA Framework

Over the past decade, tabletop systems are becoming more popular. However, prior works on tabletop system have mostly focused on supporting user interactions with digital contents on one single tabletop display, which are not easily extendable. In this paper we present a new scalable distributed tabletop system consisted of master/slave computer and tangible interfaces to provide high-resolution interactive tabletop display surfaces. Our work is to develop a tabletop system constructed with LCD panels and a cluster of low-cost commodity PCs to support a large high-resolution scalable tiled display. It also employs the tangible user interface using the infrared camera tracking and tangible blocks to support intuitive user interaction on the tabletop surface. In this research, EBITA (Environment for Building Interactive Tangible Applications) framework is developed to support various modules necessary for easy construction of any interactive high-resolution applications that run on the distributed tabletop system. This paper briefly describes the design of EBITA framework and detail implementations of the current prototype of distributed tabletop system. Then it demonstrates two applications developed using EBITA framework: 2D high-resolution image viewer and 3D block crash game.