Actibles: design and development of a new platform for active tangibles

Abstract

In this thesis, we present a new kind of active tangible call an Actible. Actibles are an open source hardware/software platform for designing and implementing active tangibles for Tangible Embodied Interaction (TEI) applications. Web technologies and a smartwatch core are leveraged for ease of development, and enables the active tangibles to act coupled to a server, or act as their own server. This kind of connectivity enables the use of the Actibles independently or in combination with other devices and displays ubiquitously. We derived an expanded set of input and output interactions based on previous work on active tangibles, including tilting, shaking, neighboring, stacking, on-screen gestures, and integrated LED feedback. We describe the design and technical implementation of these interactions, and demonstrate it's use in a multitude of published example applications.