The Design of a Tangible User Interface for a Real-Time Strategy Game

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) allow interaction with computer applications using physical objects called tangibles. TUIs have a number of latent advantages over traditional user interfaces including spatial naturalness and immediate haptic feedback where users receive both tactile and digital responses from computer systems. This paper presents the preliminary design and test results of a tabletop Tangible User Interface for a real-time strategy game. A preliminary assessment of the TUI prototype was conducted by comparison with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) version of the same real-time strategy game. The results showed that users performed better with the GUI and found it easier to use, but reported more interest and greater enjoyment when using the TUI. However, preferences were split evenly between the two interface types. Based on this initial evaluation, suggestions are made for improving the TUI design and potential future research is identified.