CONTEXT

The project focuses on the team meetings during preliminary design phase of a mechanical engineering project. During these meetings, participants work in an interactive space made up of an interactive tabletop and whiteboard, with natural multi-touch and vocal interaction. They can use the large surfaces to create documents, view past projects or consult information from the Internet.

OBJECTIVES

Studies have shown that the preliminary design phase is the most important engineering phase in terms of a cost-effective decision-making. But this phase still has yet to receive any significant amount of computer-support. The TATIN project therefore aims to design more computing devices to increase the performance of this phase in the mechanical engineering projects.

APPROACHE

The TATIN project aims to design and develop a collaborative platform which uses a large multi-touch, multi-user interactive table, coupled with an interactive board display. These vertical and horizontal surfaces allow for complementary styles of collaboration. Users primarily interact with simple multitouch gestures, but for more complex commands, advanced users also have the possibility of using voice commands. The voice interaction is facilitated by cognitive software agents, which can give confirmations and ask questions in the case of ambiguous commands.

All the devices in the room are connected using a custom-designed multi-agent system, which manages the multi-device user interaction. In our implementation, we blend together agents from two different toolkits JADE and OMAS, which perform complementary roles in the infrastructure.

INNOVATION

Interactive tabletops and whiteboard are new devices and very few are actually used for professional use. The TATIN-PIC project is different than similar project because it is multi-user, multi-device, multimodal (multitouch and voice interaction) and implemented using a multi-agent system.

PROJECT DATA

Scientific Background: Engineering Design, Computer Science / HCI and Cognitive Sciences.

UTC labs involved: Costech, Heudiasyc, Roberval, Innovation Centre.

Keywords : interactive tabletop, interactive whiteboard, multi-user, multimodal interaction, multi-agent systems

VIDEOS