Costa Sousa, MárioSharlin, EhudSomanath, Sowmya2012-10-032012-11-132012-10-032012http://hdl.handle.net/11023/264Digital tabletops are powerful interaction mediums. As a virtual medium their computational capabilities allow the user to digitally explore, transform and embellish the input content to gain further insights about the pertinent information. On the other hand, as a physical medium, their form factor inherently supports collaboration and presents opportunities to place other physical objects atop to assist and enhance the exploration experience. In this thesis, we propose the use of tabletops as an interaction medium to explore reservoir post-processing flow simulation models using virtual content - visualizations and a physical agent - Spidey: a tabletop robotic assistant. We discuss results that emerged from evaluating each of the prototypes, presenting the potential of each of these concepts and their applicability to the domain of reservoir engineering. With the Spidey testbed we explored the notion of proxemics between a user and a robotic tabletop assistant and performed a user study in which participants interacted with Spidey. Thus in the results, we also discuss the proxemics results reflecting on the interaction between people and tabletop robots.engUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.Computer ScienceDigital TabletopsReservoir EngineeringVisualizationsTabletop Robotsmaster thesis10.11575/PRISM/26104