Active Corners: Collaborative In-Car Interaction Design

We present active corners , a novel interaction approach for in-car collaboration that maps the spatial arrangement of a car with up to four people (i.e., driver, front seat passenger, and two rear seat passengers) to the form factor of a tablet (i.e., having 4 corners). We use this mental model to allow the driver and passengers to collaborate with each other. Interaction is done by dragging-and-dropping items into the according corners of individual tablets. We present the basic interaction design concept along with three application scenarios. In order to evaluate active corners, we have implemented a multiplayer card game that exploits the proposed interaction concept and fosters collaboration. We report on four field studies in which we evaluated different aspects of the active corners concept. Results show that the interaction approach is intuitive and provides a high usability even in driving conditions.