OrigamUi: Creating Personalized, Tangible User Interfaces from Paper

Common user interfaces nowadays neither adapt to the specific user nor the task at hand. We present a method which allows to quickly and inexpensively create personalized interfaces from plain paper. Users can cut out shapes that they require for their interface and assign control functions to these paper snippets via a simple configuration interface. For example, to control a sound system, a user could cut out a triangular play button and assign the corresponding play function to it, and create a slider from three paper bars for controlling the volume. After configuration, control takes place entirely through the manipulation of the paper shapes, providing the experience of a personalized and tangible user interface that is tailored to the specific user. The shapes and assignments can be dynamically changed during use. Our system is based on (markerless) tracking of the user's fingers and the paper shapes on a surface using a depth camera mounted above the interaction space, which is the only hardware sensor required. We furthermore report on an elicitation study where we investigated which shapes and types of interactions are relevant for our method, and identified 25 interaction abstractions. We implemented 13 of the most common of these abstractions in a prototype. Using our method, participants in a second study successfully built real applications with paper snippet interfaces, which proves the validity of our approach.