Tangi: a Tool to Create Tangible Artifacts for Sharing Insights from 360$^\circ$ Video

TL;DR

Tangi is an open-source web tool that converts 360° videos into tangible artifacts, enhancing collaborative analysis by enabling spatial orientation and linking details within immersive environments.

Contribution

The paper introduces Tangi, a novel tool that transforms 360° videos into tangible artifacts, facilitating collaborative insights and spatial understanding in design contexts.

Findings

Tangi enables tangible interactions in collaborative workshops.

It introduces spatial orientation within 360° environments.

It links specific details to the broader 360° context.

Abstract

Designers often engage with video to gain rich, temporal insights about the context of users, collaboratively analyzing it to gather ideas, challenge assumptions, and foster empathy. To capture the full visual context of users and their situations, designers are adopting 360$^\circ$ video, providing richer, more multi-layered insights. Unfortunately, the spherical nature of 360$^\circ$ video means designers cannot create tangible video artifacts such as storyboards for collaborative analysis. To overcome this limitation, we created Tangi, a web-based tool that converts 360$^\circ$ images into tangible 360$^\circ$ video artifacts, that enable designers to embody and share their insights. Our evaluation with nine experienced designers demonstrates that the artifacts Tangi creates enable tangible interactions found in collaborative workshops and introduce two new capabilities: spatial orientation within 360$^\circ$ environments and linking specific details to the broader 360$^\circ$ context. Since Tangi is an open-source tool, designers can immediately leverage 360$^\circ$ video in collaborative workshops.