BendDesk

News

• Our BendDesk video has been watched 1.5 million times (Feb 18, 2019).
• Der digitale Schreibtisch, WDR, Mar 14, 2012.
• BendDesk on World Usability Day Aachen, Nov 10, 2011.
• BendDesk on Channel One Russia, May 14, 2011.
• BendDesk in QUO magazine (Spanish), Jan 25, 2011.
• BendDesk featured on engadget, gizmodo, golem (German), cnet and heute.de (German), Dec 6, 2010.
• See BendDesk at the Tag der Informatik 2010 on Dec 3, 2010.
• Forscher entwickeln den Schreibtisch der Zukunft, Handelsblatt Online, Dec 1, 2010.

Press releases

• Short introduction by campushunter (German). (April 18, 2011)
• High resolution photo package (167 MB). (December 3, 2010)
• Initial media package with high-resolution photo of BendDesk. (November 30, 2010)

What is BendDesk?

For most people from many different disciplines a desk is the main workspace. A typical desk is composed of at least one or more vertical displays that show digital content and a larger horizontal area, containing input devices, such as mouse and keyboard, paper-based documents, and everyday objects. These two areas are clearly separated which makes it hard to move documents from one surface to the other. Furthermore, each area employs a different interaction technique. For example, we use the mouse for drawing on vertical displays but physical pens to annotate paper-based documents. BendDesk is our vision of a future workspace that allows continuous interaction between both areas.

BendDesk is a multi-touch desk environment that seamlessly combines a vertical and a horizontal surface with a curve into one large interactive workspace. This workspace can be used to display any digital content like documents, photos, or videos. Multi-touch technology allows the user to interact with the entire surface using direct manipulation and multi-touch gestures. We took special care for ergonomics. Users can comfortably sit at the desk and place everyday objects on it. Have a look at the video!

Download the paper

Video

Watch our video on YouTube or as HD QuickTime video (30 MB).

The Team

BendDesk is a research project by Malte Weiss, Simon Voelker, Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group, and Christine Sutter from the Department of Work and Cognitive Psychology. It is funded in part through the German B-IT Foundation. Thanks to Christian Remy for his help on the project.

Please contact Simon Voelker for further information.

Publications

2012

• Simon Voelker, Christine Sutter, Lei Wang and Jan Borchers. Understanding Flicking on Curved Surfaces.  In CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '12, pages 189–198, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2012.
  

2011

• Stefan Hafeneger. Starfire, 20 Years Later: A Vision Revisited. Diplomarbeit, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, November 2011.
  

2010

• Malte Weiss, Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers. The BendDesk Demo - Multi-touch on a Curved Display.  In ITS '10: Adjunct Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 317, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2010.
  
• Malte Weiss, Simon Voelker, Christine Sutter and Jan Borchers. BendDesk: Dragging Across the Curve.  In ITS '10: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 1–10, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2010.
  
• Simon Voelker. BendDesk: Seamless Integration of Horizontal and Vertical Multi-Touch Surfaces in Desk Environments. Diplomarbeit, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Jun 2010.
  

2009

• Malte Weiss, Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers. BendDesk: Seamless Integration of Horizontal and Vertical Multi-Touch Surfaces in Desk Environments.  In Adjunct Proceedings ITS ’09. ACM, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2009.
  

Related projects

• Curve is a curved multi-touch surface by LMU Munich.