Papers
CHI 2002
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Minneapolis, Minnesota
20-25 April 2002
© 2002 ACM


A Tangible Interface for Organizing Information Using a Grid Robert J.K. Jacob*, Hiroshi Ishii, Gian Pangaro, and James Patten

*Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Tufts University, Medford, Mass. USA

ABSTRACT

The task of organizing information is typically performed either by physically manipulating note cards or sticky notes or by arranging icons on a computer with a graphical user interface. We present a new tangible interface platform for manipulating discrete pieces of abstract information, which attempts to combine the benefits of each of these two alternatives into a single system. We developed interaction techniques and an example application for organizing conference papers. We assessed the effectiveness of our system by experimentally comparing it to both graphical and paper interfaces. The results suggest that our tangible interface can provide a more effective means of organizing, grouping, and manipulating data than either physical operations or graphical computer interaction alone.

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