The idea of focusing on the idea of the augmented table after building and presenting the 3d-prototype was born over the construction of a sketches tree over all our sketched ideas. Out of all devices we discussed the table was our best solution to merge the idea of augmentation and nature inspired interactive visualizations. The table also became a central focusing point in our 3d-prototype. The round shape of the table came to us by accident, because we just had the round shaped Playmobil table. We decided to keep the round shape, because it seemed more suitable for collaborative interactions.

In our first experiments, we sketched with a presentation tool. Therefore we placed the concepts from our artifact collection and some multimedia items together in a round shape. In this early step the idea of the main menu as a round circle at the border of the disply was already born.

Our first idea of the start screens was very simple and suits the natural theme.

To show the top topics of Twitter we used the growing gras metaphor. Thereby we got a first impression of how important it is to always consider the round shape of the table. If the gras is displayed like shown in the picture we make no use of the shape. The overall picture also does not look good.

The grouping of events and content is one of the main topics of the interactive table. To show these sets of content we decided to look at flower bunches.

Reading reviews from other customers about a product before buying something in the Internet is very popular. We want to adapt this idea and establish it to our library system. Therefore we used the metaphor of a stem.

We produced two visualizations of related multimedia content and developed a additional problem. Multimedia data, books and DVDs are all in rectangular shape.

In the next steps we concentrated on our identified problems from the previous section. We also already have known about the Stop Motion Video and started concentrating on two key scenes. The basic idea is to make everything rotate-able.

One of our key scenes is the overview over the content to one specific theme like the top twitter trends, sorted by retweets. We finally used some kind of tree metaphor.

The other key scene is the zoomed view of one single item and related content to this item. We tried to use flower and stem metaphors.

We also came up with a collaborative idea. Inside of one theme it should be possible for different people to browse through different items. The following sketch shows four content flowers each representing another item and the content related to this item.

7. Storyboard ———————————————————————————————— 9. Stop Motion Video