Simulation and Digital Prototyping of Tangible User Interfaces

Physical prototyping is an important part in research and development of tangible user interfaces (TUIs). On the way from the idea to a working prototype, hardware prototypes usually have to be crafted repeatedly in numerous iterations. However, this can be very timeand cost-intensive when non-standard, expensive hardware components are part of the design. This brings us to think about digital prototypes that exhibit the same functionality as a physical TUI, but reduce the amount of resources that have to be spent. For that reason, we present a middleware-based process that allows developing and testing fully functional implementations of a tangible user interface as a digital device in a 3D virtual environment.