Merging tangible buttons and spatial augmented reality to support ubiquitous prototype designs

Abstract

The industrial design prototyping process has previously shown promising enhancements using Spatial Augmented Reality to increase the fidelity of concept visualizations. This paper explores further improvements to the process by incorporating tangible buttons to allow dynamically positioned controls to be employed by the designer. The tangible buttons are equipped with RFID tags that are read by a wearable glove sensor system to emulate button activation for simulating prototype design functionality. We present a new environmental setup to support the low cost development of an active user interface that is not restricted to the two-dimensional surface of a traditional computer display. The design of our system has been guided by the requirements of industrial designers and an expert review of the system was conducted to identify its usefulness and usability aspects. Additionally, the quantitative performance evaluation of the RFID tags indicated that the concept development using our system to support a simulated user interface functionality is an improvement to the design process. © 2012, Australian Computer Society, Inc.