A Framing and Analysis of Applicative Tangible Interfaces

The investigation of tangible user interfaces commenced approximately thirty years ago. Questions on its commercial potential become more pressing as the field becomes mature. To take the field one step further -- as the emergence of components contributed to the commercial development of graphical user interfaces -- this article suggests that applicative tangible user interfaces could also be split into components. These components are composed of the aggregation, combination, or coupling of physical items and fulfil four roles that are described through a new interaction model. This article successfully distributed among these four components' roles all of the 159 physical items from a representative collection of 35 applications. Further examination of these applicative tangible interfaces coincides with four research phases in the field and identifies three main paths for future research to fully realize the potential of tangible user interfaces.