TK’s Smart Table featured in Commerzbank video about the future of work
2016/08/03
Commerzbank, Germany’s second largest bank, produced a vision film about the future of work and workplaces. It features three areas of TU Darmstadt‘s spin-off company Leap-in-Time headed by Prof. Ruth Stock-Homburg from the economics department. A key element of the film and of the Leap-in-Time exhibition is a prototype team workplace that shows TK’s Smart Table, which allows a team to experience teamwork in close proximity around a table.
The table happens to be a custom-built digital tabletop on which each team member can only see his or her personal / private output plus the team-wide shared output. Input is controlled such that, again, team members can only manipulate their private space and the shared space.
Moving information from private to shared spaces and back is one of several custom operations supported by the smart table, initiated by means of simple hand gestures. The Smart Table supports quick and seamless transitions between close collaboration and loose collaboration: pertinent studies of cooperating teams found this transition to be an essential core element of almost any teamwork.
The video is in German and can be viewed on YouTube:
