Papier-Mâché: Toolkit support for tangible interaction

Studies of office workers, web designers, and oral historians have found that even in the digital age (and sometimes because of it), we are using paper more and more. The paper-saturated office is not a failing of digital technology; it is a validation of our expertise with the physical world. We use paper, and writing surfaces more generally, in their myriad forms: books, notepads, whiteboards, Post-it notes, and diagrams. We use these physical artifacts to read, take notes, design, edit, and plan. Here, we present Papier-Mâché, a toolkit for building tangible interfaces using computer vision, RFID tags, and bar-codes. The toolkit provides a high-level event model for working with these technologies. This abstraction layer also facilitates technology portability: for example an application can be prototyped with computer vision, and later deployed with RFID tags. We also present the usercentered design methods we employed to build this toolkit.