Tangibilisation of an educational scheduling game’s graphical interface

Overview & Synopsis

TUI or Tangible User Interface is a type of interfaces that merges the physical and digital. They are usually opposed to Graphical User Interface, or GUI, where the physical devices (e.g. keyboard and mouse) and the digital objects displayed (e.g. mouse cursor, buttons, ...) are distinct. According to the state of the art, TUIs offers a lot of promised advantages. Hence bringing a GUI into the tangible could be beneficial to the players’ outcomes. This paper presents such conversion, using a nursing students training game, and the choices made during such design. Clone, the game, teaches scheduling to nursing students in France. The TUI recreates Clone’s scheduling interface using 3d printed tokens and board and connects those object to the game using image recognition and pattern on the bottom of the 3d printed elements.