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 tab...

We investigate the effect of using a tangible user interface (TUI) for discoverybased learning. For this purpose, we built EarExplorer, an interactive tangible system where students can manipulate and connect parts of the auditory system to rebuild a functional structure. An augmented reality layer displays sound waves and shows how they are transformed at various stages of the process. Our pre...

EmotionsOnto is a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology is proposed as a way to develop an easily computerizable and flexible formal model. Moreover, it is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard, which also makes ontologies easily shareable and extensible. Once formalize...

Prototyping is an important part in research and development of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). On the way from the idea to a working prototype, new hardware prototypes usually have to be crafted repeatedly in numerous iterations. This brings us to think about virtual prototypes that exhibit the same functionality as a real TUI, but reduce the amount of time and resources that have to be spent...

Multi-touch and tangible input paradigms provide new opportunities for post-WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) user interfaces. The development of such novel interfaces challenges designers and software developers alike. TUIO AS3 addresses these challenges by providing a toolkit for the rapid development of multi-touch and tangible user interface (TUI) interaction. The TUIO AS3 toolkit compr...

A new Tangible User Interface (TUI) device, m-ActiveCube, is proposed as a multimedia extension of ActiveCube, which is a TUI device that enables more efficient human computer interaction than conventional devices. First, fundamental specifications of m-ActiveCube are determined to remove the processing performance and functionality limitation of the original ActiveCube. By utilizing improved p...

This paper proposes a design concept for a tangible interface for collaborative performances that incorporates two social factors present during performance, the individual creation and adaptation of technology and the sharing of it within a community. These factors are identified using the example of a laptop ensemble and then applied to three existing collaborative performance paradigms. Fina...

Tangible user interfaces (TUIs) can create engaging and useful interactive systems. However, along with the power of these interfaces comes challenges; they are often so specialized and novel that building a TUI system involves working at a low level with custom hardware and software. As a result the community of people that are capable of creating TUIs is limited. With this project we aim to m...