Modeling tangible game controls with ToyVision

This paper presents "ToyVision", a software toolkit aimed to make easy the prototyping of tangible games in visual based tabletop devices. The architecture of ToyVision incorporates a new abstraction layer, the Widget layer. This layer is the distinguishing feature of ToyVision and allows developers to model, in a higher level, tangible controls with richer tangible interaction. The hardware layer is based on Reactivision open-source toolkit, which has been extended with new functionalities in its Hardware layer. 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. To show the potentiality of the toolkit, two games with their different controls generated thanks to the characteristics of ToyVision are shown.