Tangible Interfaces for Concept-based Web Browsing

In this paper, we present a novel method for browsing an academic website using a tangible user interface. The problem is challenging since web-sites are page-centric – making it hard for visitors to the academic unit determine the concept relationships. The concept relationships on a website change over time and this is captured in our framework. The tangible interface framework has four parts: vision-based acquisition, visual processing, tangible interaction and audio-visual feedback. We use abstract blocks to represent concepts and by mapping the visuals to the interaction surface, the visitors can determine concept relationships easily. The blocks are tracked using standard computer vision techniques. The auditory feedback uses bird sounds that are created dynamically, using generative models. User studies have provided encouraging results.