VDesktop: Event Management and Physically Based Behaviour in Tabletop Displays

Abstract

Applications for digital tabletops have some notable differences when compared to traditional desktop applications, the principal difference being that the user input method is not the traditional combination of mouse and keyboard. This work addresses the difficulties and characteristics of event-handling management, when the applications are extended from 2D to 3D in the context of tabletop displays and where the interactions between the user and the represented 3D objects are more complex. This complexity increases when physically based behaviour of the objects is considered. More specifically, the scope of this work is oriented to the support of physic-based simulation events in a tabletop display with an implementation of a system based on the OGRE graphical library and the ODE physical library, that are able to handle such elements.