A tangible user interface for interactive data visualization
Ana Jofré, Steve Szigeti, Stephen Tiefenbach Keller, Lan-Xi Dong, David Czarnowski, Frederico Tomé, Sara L. Diamond · OCAD University Open Research Repository (OCAD University) · 2015
We present a prototype for a Tangible User Interface (TUI) designed to interactively query a database. While much work has been done on TUI, showing that they encourage collaboration and positively enhance user experience, few tangible systems have been designed specifically for data analysis tasks. Our system combines a tabletop (non-digital) graspable user interface with a two-dimensional screen display; the user interrogates the data by placing tokens on or off the tabletop and the screen displays the results of the user's query. The objects are tagged using fiducial markers, which are identified with open-source ReacTIVision computer vision software, and the visualization code is written in Processing. We use radio station listenership demographic data for this prototype, but the system can be used to query any type of database.