Custom-made Tangible Interfaces with TouchTokens

Caroline Appert (1, 2) , Emmanuel Pietriga (1, 2) , Eléonore Bartenlian (1, 2) , Rafael Morales González (1, 2)

1 Université Paris-Saclay
2 ILDA - Interacting with Large Data

TouchTokens were introduced recently as a means to design low-cost tangible interfaces. The technique consists in recognizing multi-touch patterns associated with specific tokens, and works on any touch-sensitive surface, with passive tokens that can be made out of any material. TouchTokens have so far been limited to a few basic geometrical shapes only, which puts a significant practical limit to how tailored token sets can be. In this article, we introduce TouchTokenBuilder and TouchTokenTracker that, taken together, aim at facilitating the development of tailor-made tangible interfaces. TouchTokenBuilder is an application that assists interface designers in creating token sets using a simple direct-manipulation interface. TouchTokenTracker is a library that enables tracking the tokens' full geometry. We report on experiments with those tools, showing the strengths and limitations of tangible interfaces with passive tokens.

Mots clés: Gestural input; Tangible Interaction; Customization

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga, Eléonore Bartenlian, Rafael Morales González. Custom-made Tangible Interfaces with TouchTokens. International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI '18), May 2018, Grosseto, Italy. pp.15, ⟨10.1145/3206505.3206509⟩. ⟨hal-01777599⟩