DISCOlab: a toolkit for development of shared display systems in UbiCollab

Abstract

Shared displays are important tools for promoting collaboration.Ubiquitous computing presents new requirements for the design of shared display systems.Contextualisation of information at shared displays is becoming more important. The ability to rapidly create shared display systems is motivated by the fact that shared displays play central roles in collaboration. Low level implementation issues, common to shared display systems can be an obstacle for this. A toolkit for creation of such systems is therefore needed to provide basic shared display functionality to developers. This master thesis presents a toolkit for creating shared display applications on UbiCollab, a platform supporting collaborative work in ubiquitous environments. The work shows the development of the toolkit and how the toolkit can be used to create a shared display system. The toolkit takes advantage of the opportunities the UbiCollab platform provides on contextualisation of information.