TangibleTouch: A Toolkit for Designing Surface-based Gestures for Tangible Interfaces

Abstract

This pictorial introduces TangibleTouch, a toolkit to design and build interactive tangible cubes using capacitive sensing. This toolkit enables designers to quickly prototype and explore tangible cubes with exchangeable capacitive panels that allows touch-based gestures and interactions that can be used for tangible input in VR, AR, or physical computing. We introduce a design space for TangibleTouch, and present the technical implementation, fabrication approaches, and software support for designers. We evaluate our toolkit by demonstrating its use and application for 3 different case studies: a media controller, a platform game, and a 3D model inspection tool. The contribution of our work is a novel toolkit method for constructing and fabricating a cube-based interactive tangible user interface.

Data Cubes in Hand: A Design Space of Tangible Cubes for Visualizing 3D Spatio-Temporal Data in Mixed Reality

“…Cordeil et al 's work [9] discussed tangibles in a general sense, rather than specifically concentrating on tangible cubes or proposing specific visual mappings. Potts et al's work [61] targeted only surface-gesture-based interactions without exploring the full range of user action possibilities. Therefore, in this work, we aim to propose a more focused and complete design space investigating the interaction opportunities offered by tangible cubes in MR environments.…”

“…Building upon the foundation laid by established taxonomies outlined in related works, we assembled an initial set of interaction actions: rotate, translate, shake, cover, swipe, pinch, path, tap, hover, neighbor, stack and assemble [61,73]. Similarly, a repertoire of spatio-temporal visualization commands was constructed, encompassing chopping, flattening, recoloring, combination and re-scale [2,3].…”