On tangible user interfaces, humans and spatiality

TL;DR

This paper explores how tangible user interfaces leverage human spatial skills and proposes heuristics for designing spatial TUIs that effectively mediate interaction with shape, space, and structure.

Contribution

It introduces heuristics for integrating spatiality into TUI design and analyzes existing spatial TUIs using these guidelines.

Findings

Heuristics for spatial TUI design derived from human-object interaction research.

Analysis of existing spatial TUIs using proposed heuristics.

Emphasis on the importance of spatiality for TUI success.

Abstract

Like the prehistoric twig and stone, tangible user interfaces (TUIs) are objects manipulated by humans. TUI success will depend on how well they exploit spatiality, the intuitive spatial skills humans have with the objects they use. In this paper we carefully examine the relationship between humans and physical objects, and related previous research. From this examination we distill a set of observations, and turn these into heuristics for incorporation of spatiality into TUI application design, a cornerstone for their success. Following this line of thought, we identify spatial TUIs, the subset of TUIs that mediate interaction with shape, space and structure. We then examine several existing spatial TUIs using our heuristics.