CoffeeTable - Collaborative Software Development on the Table

CoffeeTable is a working vision for the future of collaborative IDEs. It uses the physical desk space between people to create a simple, playful, and collaborative environment that helps people work together to develop software.

We wrote a paper about the design and inital evaulation of our colocated collaborative IDE (and what we learned about how it impacts constructions in source code and team dynamics). The paper was accepted for publication at the International Conference in Software Engineering 2011, and can be downloaded here.

Social Specs?

Code by typing directly on your laptop while the architecture of your software evolves before you on the table.

Comfortably work together on tasks that are complex and architectural but easily parallelise team efforts when doing simple and well understood tasks.

Tech Specs?

CoffeeTable is low cost and implemented using two Wiimotes and a projector. We use WiiTUIO to generate touch events which are passed to the IDE visulisation (built usingMicrosoft's WPF).

CoffeeTable is a fully functional Java IDE which is trivial to make language agnostic.

What is the future of CoffeeTable?

CoffeeTable is just one possible future among many.
We believe that tools like CoffeeTable can help establish a shared vision and common goals in an often long complicated process.

Tell me about some more CoffeeTable features?

Some of the main features are highlighted to the left. Despite being a drastic departure from the norm, the majority said they enjoyed using the system and it "made it fun".