SparKubes

Abstract

Figure 1: (a) SparKube, (b) Direct manipulation, (c) Indirect manipulation and (d) Indirect manipulation with mirror cubes. ABSTRACTTangible objects have seen an ongoing integration into realworld settings, e.g. in the classroom. These objects allow for instance learners to explore digital content in the physical space and leverage the physicality of the interface for spatial interaction. In this paper, we present SparKubes, a set of stand-alone tangible objects that are corded with simple behaviors and do not require additional instrumentation or setup. This overcomes a variety of issues such as setting up network connection and instrumentation of the environmentas long as a SparKube sees another, it "works". The contribution of this paper is three-fold: we (1) present the implementation of a minimalistic tangible platform as the basis for SparKube, (2) depict the design space that covers a variety of interaction primitives and (3) show how these primitives can be combined to create and manipulate SparKube interfaces in the scope of two salient application scenarios: tangible widgets and the manipulation of information flow.