Interactions with real and digital elements for collaborative document creation

We present a workspace based on a large interactive desktop that provides interaction with digital information and physical objects. This environment is designed to support the tasks that usually are performed at our laboratory work desk, such as workgroup, brainstorming sessions and meetings, for users who can be at the laboratory or accessing to it from a remote location. Digital and real object share the same space and mixed manipulation is easily achieved. Users can transfer information from a real document or any object to create digital versions, or can augment objects with digital information. Also real objects, even others than documents, can be used to perform programmed actions. Any task can be performed with the most ideal physical tool for a given action. Our objective is to use the available technologies to eliminate the barrier between real and digital when interacting with a computer.