Resumen de Virtuaom, tangible interface for collaborative human computer interaction: considerations on the construction of tangible media systems applied to interactive systems in museums

C.C. Ventes, J.A. Cifuentes, Andrés Adolfo Navarro Newball

• Thinking about scenarios and displays of museums, where it is expected that the technology instead of replacing the existing content becomes a support tool that allows visitors to appropriating knowledge shown by this content in an interactive way, we explore the concept of Tangible Media, to exploit the capabilities of the human being to have haptic interactions to give a physical representation to digital information creating physical interfaces that represent the physical shape of the object and the interactions that the user performs with it to perform a task on a computer system. By bringing these digital representations to the real world is presumed that the user can achieve a faster association with a system making it more intuitive. Similarly, one can think that in this case those tangible elements can be part of the same content with the displayed elements.

  Applying the concept of tangible media, following a methodology that tries to combine traditional methods of software development with user experience-oriented design methods we developed VirtuaOM, a library which helps developers design and implement interfaces where the system is able to recognize and track users interacting with tangible objects within an area located on the floor of a room. It is intended that this area of interaction is located in the floor to allow a large enough area so that multiple users can move freely within it, thereby not only allows the interaction between a user and a tangible item, but the interaction between multiple users to solve tasks in a collaborative way.