Tabletop computers (also known as surface computers, smart tables, and interactive surface computers) have been growing in popularity for the last decade and are poised to make in‐roads into the consumer market, opening up a new market for the games industry. However, before tabletop computers become widely accepted, there are open problems that must be addressed with respect to audio interaction including: "What loudspeaker constellations are appropriate for tabletop computers?" "How does our perception of spatial sound change with these different loudspeaker configurations?" and "What panning methods should be used to maximally use the spatial localization abilities of the user(s)?" Using a custom‐built tabletop computer setup, the work presented in this thesis investigated these three questions/problems via a series of experiments. The results of these experiments indicated that accurately localizing a virtual sound source on a horizontal surface is a difficult and error‐prone task, for all of the methods that were used. / UOIT

Game sketching is used to identify enjoyable designs for digital games without the expense of fully implementing them. This thesis presents Raptor, a novel tool for sketching games. Raptor shows how tabletop interaction can effectively support the ideation phase of interaction design by permitting small collocated groups to participate in the design and testing process together. Raptor relies heavily on efficient gesture-based interaction, mixed-reality interaction involving physical props and digital artifacts, Wizard-of-Oz demonstration gameplay sketching, and fluid change of roles between designer and tester. An evaluation of Raptor using seven groups of three people showed that a sketching tool based on a tabletop computer indeed supports ideation and collaboration among collocated groups better than a more traditional PC-based tool. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-12 14:06:34.363