Florian Sprengel submitted his Master’s Thesis “ChordCubes”, a music application incorporating the TAOs.

Abstract: “For a musician to grow and become more proficient as an instrumentalist it takes a fair amount of practice. But to also develop musicality requires more than the numb and repetitive exercising of scales. In order to make musical practice both efficient and entertaining, we propose a new musical practice tool that is based on a Tangible User Interface (TUI).

The Active Home EntertAinment Desk (AHEAD) is a universal multi-user tabletop media navigation and control system for the living room. It consists of actuated (robotic) and passive tangible objects used on a large interactive surface (Samsung SUR40). With AHEAD, users can browse, navigate and control available media data and devices, implementing the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) standard, such as modern televisions and other media devices. Thereby our system is compatible with most current television sets and home entertainment systems and acts as a universal control for several multimedia devices.

In this paper we showcase an integrative approach for our actuated Tangible Active Objects (TAOs), that demonstrates distributed collaboration support to become a versatile and comprehensive dynamic user interface with multi-modal feedback. We incorporated physical actuation, visual projection in 2D and 3D, and vibro-tactile feedback. We demonstrate this approach in a furniture placing scenario where the users can interactively change the furniture model represented by each TAO using a dial-based tangible actuated menu. We demonstrate virtual constraints between our TAOs to automatically maintain spatial relations.

In this paper we present a novel approach for Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) which incorporate small mobile platforms to actuate Tangible User Interface Objects (TUIOs). We propose an application of Tangible Active Objects (TAOs) in combination with gestural interaction for social networking. TUIOs represent messages while gestural input using these objects is used for triggering actions with these messages. We conducted a case study and present the results. We demonstrate interaction with a working social networking client.