Lowering the threshold and raising the ceiling of tangible expressiveness in hybrid board-games

Tabletop devices offer an attractive environment for the creation of hybrid board-games that seamlessly integrate physical and digital interaction. However, the prototyping of Tangible User Interfaces involves the integration of physical and virtual aspects, challenging both designers and developers, and hindering the rapid exploration of richer physical interactions with the game. Although the recent appearance of tabletop frameworks has helped to lower the threshold for coding tangible tabletop applications, the cost is a serious limitation on the degree of expressiveness of the tangible interaction. This paper presents “ToyVision”, a software framework for the prototyping of tabletop games based on the manipulation of conventional playing pieces. ToyVision architecture is based on a Widget layer of abstraction that is able to express the manipulation of playing pieces in the context of the game. This Widget layer supports a wide range of passive and active manipulations with conventional objects. Designers and developers can visually model all passive and active manipulations involved in their game concepts in a Graphic Assistant, and test them immediately in a tabletop device. The paper also describes a set of evaluation sessions which demonstrate that ToyVision has been effective in lowering the threshold of developing applications for tabletop devices, while being sufficiently expressive to give support to innovative concepts for hybrid games that fully explore the tangible feasibilities of conventional playing pieces.