ToyVision: a toolkit for prototyping tabletop tangible games

This paper presents "ToyVision", a software toolkit aimed to make easy the prototyping of tangible games in visual based tabletop devices. Compared to other software toolkits which offer very limited and tag-centered tangible possibilities, ToyVision provides designers and developers with intuitive tools for modeling innovative tangible controls and with higher level user's manipulations data. ToyVision is based on Reactivision open-source toolkit, which has been extended with new functionalities in its Hardware layer. The main design decision taken has been to split the Widget Layer from the lower abstraction layers. This new abstraction layer (the Widget layer) is the distinguishing feature of ToyVision and provides the developer with access to a set of encapsulated classes that give the status of any playing piece handled in the tabletop while the game is running. The toolkit has been complemented with a Graphic Assistant that gathers from the designer all the information needed by the toolkit to model all the tangible playing pieces. As a practical example, the process of prototyping a tangible game is described.