Base Requirements for Virtual Tabletop Groupware Artifacts

Abstract

Group work is a crucial part of our everyday life. While individual work is already relatively well supported by computerized tools, co-located group work is still missing an adequate support. To enable a continuous support over all stages of work, it is desirable to close this gap. In this paper we present a survey on requirements which virtual artifacts in tabletop groupware have to fulfill to fully support co-located group work. We conducted interviews with students to determine when and how they use group work and derived requirements for virtual artifacts from these results. Based on existing literature on this field of work further requirements have been identified. These were combined with our analysis results and were transformed into a set of eight independent base requirements virtual artifacts must fulfill.