Year: 2026
Type: review
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Digital tabletops have long played an important role in human–computer interaction research, serving as rich platforms for tangible interaction, collaboration, and multi-user experiences. Despite their historical relevance, recent work still lacks a consolidated synthesis of how these systems have technically evolved. To address this gap, this article presents a Systematic Literature Review on digital tabletops, with a particular focus on input and output hardware technologies and physical configurations. The review followed a structured protocol and included searches across five major scientific databases, covering studies published between 2001 and 2025. From an initial pool of 1,515 articles, 556 studies were selected for detailed analysis. The findings reveal three technological waves, showing a progression from early projection-based systems to the widespread adoption of embedded displays (LCD/LED), alongside the growing use of sensor-assisted computer vision techniques for input. The results also point to a noticeable decline in research activity after 2015. The study discusses potential causes for this trend, including hardware standardization issues and high implementation costs. Based on the temporal coexistence of this decline with the emergence of Extended Reality ecosystems that address similar spatial and collaborative interaction goals under different terminologies, the study suggests that part of this apparent decline may reflect a shift in research focus rather than the disappearance of tabletop-related concerns.
Source: Journal on Interactive Systems
Institution: Universidade Federal de Santa Maria
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7167898593