CollEagle: Transforming Conversation into Shared Interactive Content for Collocated Collaboration

Collocated collaboration remains a preferred mode of working together, yet current systems often depend on users to create and configure shared content. This places individual effort and attention on managing workspaces rather than engaging in collective sensemaking. We present a mixed-initiative interaction mechanism that automatically transforms ongoing conversation into manipulable shared materials, shifting externalisation from an explicit individual task to a by-product of discourse. We implement this mechanism in CollEagle, an interactive tabletop system that continuously generates candidate content from speech and enables users to curate, organise, and repurpose it for joint activity. A user study shows that automating material production reduces configuration work, supports group coordination, and foregrounds shared meaning-making. We contribute (1) a concrete implementation of a mixed-initiative interaction mechanism for collocated collaboration, and (2) design insights for systems that integrate implicit automation with explicit manipulation to better support joint work.