Toolkit Support for Integrating Physical and Digital Interactions

ABSTRACT

There is great potential in enabling users to interact with digital information by integrating it with everyday physical objects. However, developing these interfaces requires programmers to acquire and abstract physical input. This is difficult, is time-consuming, and requires a high level of technical expertise in fields very different from user interface development—especially in the case of computer vision. Based on structured interviews with researchers, a literature review, and our own experience building physical interfaces, we created Papier-Mâché, a toolkit for integrating physical and digital interactions. Its library supports computer vision, electronic tags, and barcodes. Papier-Mâché introduces high-level abstractions for working with these input technologies that facilitate technology portability. We evaluated this toolkit through a laboratory study and longitudinal use in course and research projects, finding the input abstractions, technology portability, and monitoring facilities to be highly effective.

Notes

Acknowledgments. We thank James Lin, Jack Li, and Andy Kung for their implementation assistance.

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received June 1, 2006. Revisions received March 5, 2007 and March 3, 2008. Accepted by Brad Myers.—Editor