Tangible Interface Design

A quick course/tutorial on designing Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs). This course will introduce you to the concept of tangible interfaces and allow you to rapidly design and prototype a tangible interface of your own.

Results from this tutorial

What this course will involve...

The course will run over 5 weeks at one hour per week. Full details for each week will be given nearer the time!

Week 1: introduction to tangibles

Week 2: how to rapidly prototype tangible interfaces using foamboard, paper & duct-tape

Week 3: design session (what fun things can you do with a TUI - music, games etc) + start looking into the programming side of things

Week 4: building & programming (we will most likely be using ReacTIVision for tracking physical objects and Processing for making stuff happen, though you can program in any language of your choice)

Week 5: building & programming & quick video of work

Links

  • Description of Tangible Interfaces on Wikipedia.

Videos

Code

The code from the number-game project can be downloaded here. Please remember that this was hacked together within a couple of hours, so is a touch messy!