The Effect of Interacting with Two Devices When Creating the Illusion of Internal State in Passive Tangible Widgets

This paper investigates whether the illusion of internal state in passive tangible widgets is stronger when using one touchscreen device or two devices. Passive tangible widgets are an increasingly popular way to interact with tablet games. Since the production of passive widgets is usually cheaper than the production of widgets with internal state, it is much more cost-efficient to induce the illusion of internal state in passive widgets than to use tangible widgets with an actual internal state. An experiment was conducted where the participants’ belief in the illusion was determined by means of an interview with questions regarding the functionality of the tangible widgets. The results show that using two devices is significantly better at inducing the illusion of internal state.