TTUI-SM: A New Specification Model for Tabletop Tangible User Interfaces

In the scenario of computational interfaces development, research efforts aim to offer new ways of interaction that are closer to the natural way in which humans interact with the real world. Amongst the diversity of interface modalities, the tabletop tangible interfaces make the link between physical and virtual objects, enabling to grasp and interact with their components in a physical manner, besides including multitouch interactions. However, in the development process of this kind of interface, there is a lack of a specification model that supports not only the physical object interactions but also multitouch interactions, arranging the specification in a more agile manner, easier to document and implement. Hence, this paper presents a new specification model for tabletop tangible user interface named TTUI-SM that arranges each interface element by components. A diagrammatic tool named TTUI-SMT was developed based on this model, which makes the interface specification and development faster, easier and automated. Both tool and model were submitted to an experiment where results were gathered to evaluate them under the proposed benefits.