Interconnected Interactive Floors for Spatial Awareness in Remote Collaborative Environments
With the increasing prevalence of remote and hybrid modes of collaboration, there is a growing need for spatially aware communication systems that can bridge the gap between distributed participants. In engineering and scientific laboratories, where physical co-presence and spatial coordination often play a critical role, current remote collaboration tools remain limited to screen-based interaction and lack embodied spatial cues. To address this limitation, our interactive floor project explores a tangible interface that conveys spatial presence and movement through the floor surface itself.
The system utilizes LiDAR sensors to detect the precise position of users’ footprints in real time and translates this information into visual feedback through an array of embedded LEDs. Beyond a single installation, our vision is to interconnect multiple floor systems through a network, allowing footprints detected on one floor to be visualized simultaneously on another. Such a distributed spatial interface could enhance remote collaboration among geographically separated laboratories by providing intuitive awareness of remote teammates’ locations and actions. This approach opens possibilities for more synchronized, embodied, and situationally aware remote teamwork within standardized engineering research environments.
Authors: Sida Dai, Brygg Ullmer, Elysse Newman.