Tangible Agile Mapping: Ad-hoc Tangible User Interaction Definition.

People naturally externalize mental systems through physical objects to leverage their spatial intelligence. The advent of tangible user interfaces has allowed human computer interaction to utilize these skills. However, current systems must be written from scratch and designed for a specific purpose, thus meaning end users cannot extend or repurpose the system. This paper presents Tangible Agile Mapping, our architecture to address this problem by allowing tangible systems to be defined ad-hoc. Our architecture addresses the tangible ad-hoc definition of objects, properties and rules to support tangible interactions. This paper also describes Spatial Augmented Reality TAM as an implementation of this architecture that utilizes a projector-camera setup combined with gesture-based navigation to allow users to create tangible systems from scratch. Results of a user study show that the architecture and our implementation are effective in allowing users to develop tangible systems, even for users with little computing or tangible experience.