Defining a Role-Centered Terminology for Physical Representations and Controls

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new holistic terminology and classification system for tangible user interfaces, enabling application-level understanding and comparison of physical representations and controls in the field.

Contribution

It proposes a novel, self-contained terminology and four classes of tangibility that improve classification and understanding of tangible user interfaces at the application level.

Findings

The terminology effectively describes and discriminates tangible user interfaces.

The four classes of tangibility capture key differences among applications.

The approach enhances understanding of the evolution and diversity of tangible interfaces.

Abstract

Previous classifications advanced research through a better understanding of the field and the variety of tangible user interfaces and related physical user interfaces, especially by discretizing a degree of tangibility based on the specimens produced by the community over the years, since the conceptualization of Tangible User Interface initiated a research effort to deepen the exploration of the concept. However, no taxonomy enables the classification of tangible user interfaces at the application level. This article proposes to refine the description of tangible user interfaces' interactional components through a terminological approach. The resulting terms are blended words, built from known words, that self-contain what digital role is represented or controlled and how it becomes physical. This holistic terminology then enables the definition of applications' hallmarks and four classes of tangibility for applications, which surpass the description of physical user interface specimens' morphology by abstracting and discriminating specimens at the applicative level. The descriptiveness and holisticness of the new terminology, as well as the clustering and discriminative power of the limited number of four classes, are showed on a corpus of applicative tangible user interfaces' specimens from the literature. Promising future work will benefit from the holistic terminology, the applications' hallmarks, and the tangibility classes, to describe applicative tangible user interfaces and related physical user interfaces to better understand the dozens of specimens that were produced by the field over three decades. Indeed, describing and classifying this whole set would deepen our understanding to provide tools for future developers and designers.