Most interactions with today's interfaces require a person's full and focused attention. To alleviate the potential clutter of focal information, we investigated how interactions could be designed to take place in the background or periphery of attention. This paper explores whether gestural, multimodal interaction styles of an interactive light system allow for this. A study compared the performance of interactions with the light system in two conditions: the central condition in which participants interacted only with the light system, and the peripheral condition in which they interacted with the system while performing a high-attentional task simultaneously. Our study furthermore compared different feedback styles (visual, auditory, haptic, and a combination). Results indicated that especially for the combination feedback style, the interaction could take place without participants' full visual attention, and performance did not significantly decrease in the peripheral condition. This seems to indicate that these interactions at least partly took place in their periphery of attention and that the multimodal feedback style aided this process.

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The design and interaction of physical game artifacts is becoming increasingly important for the design of digital tabletop games. In this paper a study is described investigating the differences in interpretations of realistic and abstract game artifacts comparing children and adults. A game was created on a digital tabletop as a carrier for the user evaluation presented in this paper. The appearance of the game artifacts was explored and a family of each of the artifacts was created. The interpretations of each of the individual artifacts and their different visual appearances were tested to determine whether children rank and interpret the functionalities of the artifacts differently than adults.The results showed that overall the understanding of abstract artifacts compared to realistic ones was best for both children and adults. It also indicated there was no significant difference in the interpretations of the realistic and abstract artifacts between children and adults.