Getting older does not mean being merely excluded from digital worlds. Elderly can at least use the current technology to communicate with their friends and family members without toiling, on contrary with joy and easiness. We know this is not true yet. With our research project kommTUi we do our part to get closer to this goal. In this paper we present our achievement so far. One of the outcom...

Multi-modal tabletop applications offer excellent opportunities for enriching the education of young children. Read-It is an example of an interactive game with a multi-modal tangible interface that was designed to combine the advantages of current physical games and computer exercises. It is a novel approach for supporting children who learn to read. The first experimental evaluation has demon...

People with intellectual disabilities should develop reading and writing skills since children. Otherwise, they will have additional difficulties in their daily life activities, as buying in a store, taking medicaments or getting a job. In this paper we present a prototype that uses tangible interfaces and augmented objects to support a literacy method for children with intellectual disabilitie...

Tabletop environments are ideal for collaborative activities that involve moving and arranging objects. However, manipulating 3D virtual objects through the 2D interface is challenging because users’ 2D actions must be translated into 3D actions. We explore the use of touch and tangibles to aid collaboration and 3D object manipulation. Our user study shows that using touch and tangible interact...

SoundStrand is a tangible music composition tool. It demonstrates a paradigm developed to enable music composition through the use of tangible interfaces. This paradigm attempts to overcome the contrast between the relatively small of amount degrees of freedom usually demonstrated by tangible interfaces and the vast number of possibilities that musical composition presents. SoundStrand is compr...

Playing games against people with a different skill level can be boring or frustrating, which decreases fun. A solution is to introduce specific rules that balance a game. In this paper we describe a study in which we used an electronic board game with tangible interaction to investigate whether balancing a game indeed increases fun experienced. We also investigate whether balancing skill level...

Tangible interaction is a growing area of human–computer interaction research that has become popular in recent years. Yet designers and researchers are still trying to comprehend and clarify its nature, characteristics, and implications. One approach has been to create frameworks that help us look back at and categorize past tangible interaction systems, and look forward at the possibilities a...

This paper introduces the Tangible Video Editor (TVE), a tangible interface for editing sequences of digital video clips. The TVE features multiple handheld computers embedded in specialized cases. It can be used on any surface under normal lighting conditions without the need for an augmented surface, computer vision system, or video projector. We aim the Tangible Video Editor for use in educa...