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.