In most of today projects, the digital data, knowledge and expertise required are so large that a single person is far from enough to achieve the best decisions. Many critical processes now require several people to share the project specific information as well as their own views to collectively converge towards a right conclusion. Touch tables are promising collaborative work interfaces, but require the development of specific functionalities related to their horizontal format. An especially important element is the remote collaboration one, which should ensure distant teams can work together as efficiently as if they were working close to each other. To bring such interfaces out of the lab and into real-world industrial processes, we have developed several solutions which should ease the integration of such tables in existing data and systems.

We propose a new system that efficiently combines direct multitouch interaction with co-located 3D stereoscopic visualization. In our approach, users benefit from well-known 2D metaphors and widgets displayed on a monoscopic touchscreen, while visualizing occlusion-free 3D objects floating above the surface at an optically correct distance. Technically, a horizontal semi-transparent mirror is used to reflect 3D images produced by a stereoscopic screen, while the user's hand as well as a multitouch screen located below this mirror remain visible. By registering the 3D virtual space and the physical space, we produce a rich and unified workspace where users benefit simultaneously from the advantages of both direct and indirect interaction, and from 2D and 3D visualizations. A pilot usability study shows that this combination of technology provides a good user experience.

On the one hand, multitouch tactile interfaces offer many advantages and are more and more widespread. Their use as 3D application interfaces are rather limited though, since they offer large horizontal flat projection surfaces that are not suited to many kinds of 3D operations. On the other hand, despite the many propositions that have been made over the past years, no single interface has proven to tackle the numerous specificities related to the 3D interaction constraints. Through the CubTile device proposal, our preliminary work tries to bring the strengths related to multitouch tactile surfaces into a device aimed at 3D interactions. Consisting in a medium-sized cube where 5 out of 6 sides are multitouch, our prototype senses several fingers, offers interaction redundancy and lets a user handle 3D manipulation thanks to single handed and bimanual input.