Augmenting Interactive Tabletops with Translucent Tangible Controls

Multi-touch surfaces enable multi-hand and multi-person direct manipulation interfaces. However, they lack haptic feedback. Tangible interfaces (TUIs) are a promising approach to this issue but most are special-purpose with fixed physical and visual appearance. This chapter provides an overview of recent work to add haptic feedback to interactive surfaces, including haptic and tactile displays, tangibles on tabletops, general-purpose controls, and typing on multi-touch tables. The focus of the chapter is Silicone Illuminated Active Peripherals (SLAP). SLAPWidgets are physical translucent general-purpose controls, such as buttons, knob, sliders, and keyboards, that can be used to manipulate virtual objects on interactive tabletop surfaces. They combine benefits of physical and virtual controls, providing the strong affordances and haptic feedback of physical controls and enabling the dynamically changeable appearance possibilities of virtual controls. SLAP Widgets are particularly promising for tasks in which eyes-free manipulation is advantageous and their plasticity encourages development of context sensitive controls and exploration of alternative interface forms.