MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC RESEARCH LABORATORIES http://www.merl.com Rotation and Translation Mechanisms for Tabletop Interaction Mark S. Hancock, Frederic D. Vernier, Daniel Wigdor, Sheelagh Carpendale, Chia Shen TR2005-118 January 2006 Abstract A digital tabletop, such as the one shown in Figure 1, offers several advantages over other group- ware form factors for collaborative applications. However, users of a tabletop system do not share a common perspective for the display of information: what is presented right-side-up to one participant is upsidedown for another. In this paper, we survey ﬁve different rotation and translation techniques for objects displayed on a direct-touch digital tabletop display. We ana- lyze their suitability for interactive tabletops in light of their respective input and output degrees of freedom, as well as the precision and completeness provided by each. We describe various tradeoffs that arise when considering which, when and where each of these techniques might be most useful. IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer systems (TableTop) This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonproﬁt educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c  Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 2006 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139