Tangible Stickers: A Sensor Based Tangible User Interface

Abstract

In this paper we present the Tangible Stickers, a tangible interface framework which is based on small devices that include Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) sensors, such as gyroscopes and accelerometers. These Tangible Input Devices (TID) are attached to physical objects turning them into input devices, which transmit the sensed data wirelessly to a paired server. The server maintains the states of its paired devices in a stateful manner and expose these devices with their state to interactive applications connected to the server. These applications interact with the paired devices and augment their attached physical objects creating a tangible user interface. Our framework enables an application developer to easily incorporate a tangible interface into their applications, which communicate with the server to receive the state of these devices, and update the state of their digital counterparts. We have implemented the proposed framework, tested our implementation on various scenarios and conducted a user study, whose results were encouraging.