Abstract:In the Internet of Things era, an increasing number of everyday objects are able to offer innovative services to the user. However, most of these devices provide only smartphone or web user interfaces. As a result, the interaction is disconnected from the physical world, decreasing the user experience and increasing the risk of user alienation from the physical world. We argue that tangible interaction can counteract this trend and this article discusses the potential benefits and the still open challenges of tangible interaction applied to the Internet of Things. After an analysis of open challenges for Human-Computer Interaction in IoT, we summarize current trends in tangible interaction and extrapolate eight tangible interaction properties that could be exploited for designing novel interactions with IoT objects. Through a systematic review of tangible interaction applied to IoT, we show what has been already explored in the systems that pioneered the field and the future explorations that still have to be conducted. In order to guide future work in this field, we propose a design card set for supporting the generation of tangible interfaces for IoT objects. The card set has been evaluated during a workshop with 21 people and the results are discussed.

Cultural heritage artifacts often contain details that are difficult to distinguish due to aging effects such as erosion. We propose the revealing flashlight, a new interaction and visualization technique in spatial augmented reality that helps to reveal the detail of such artifacts. We locally and interactively augment a physical artifact by projecting an expressive 3D visualization that highlights its features, based on an analysis of its previously acquired geometry at multiple scales. Our novel interaction technique simulates and improves the behavior of a flashlight: according to 6-degree-of-freedom input, we adjust the numerous parameters involved in the expressive visualization -in addition to specifying the location to be augmented. This makes advanced 3D analysis accessible to the greater public with an everyday gesture, by naturally combining the inspection of the real object and the virtual object in a co-located interaction and visualization space.The revealing flashlight can be used by archeologists, for example, to help decipher inscriptions in eroded stones, or by museums to let visitors interactively discover the geometric details and meta-information of cultural artifacts. We confirm its effectiveness, ease-of-use and ease-of-learning in an initial preliminary user study and by the feedbacks of two public exhibitions. . The Revealing Flashlight: Interactive spatial augmented reality for detail exploration of cultural heritage artifacts.

In this demonstration, we present ArcheoTUI, a new tangible user interface for the efficient assembly of the 3D scanned fragments of fractured archeological objects. The key idea is to use tangible props for the manipulation of the virtual fragments. In each hand, the user manipulates an electromagnetically tracked prop, and the translations and rotations are directly mapped to the corresponding virtual fragments on the display. For each hand, a corresponding foot pedal is used to clutch the movements of the hands. Hence, the hands of the user can be repositioned, or the user can be switched. The software of ArcheoTUI is designed to easily change assembly hypotheses, beyond classical undo/redo, by using a scene graph.