ToyVision: a toolkit to support the creation of innovative board-games with tangible interaction

This paper presents "ToyVision": a software toolkit developed to facilitate the implementation of tangible games in visual-based tabletop devices. Compared to other toolkits for tabletops which offer very limited and tag-centered tangible possibilities, ToyVision provides designers with tools for modeling and implementing innovative tangible playing pieces with a high level of abstraction from the hardware. For this purpose, a new abstraction layer (the Widget layer) has been included in an already existing tabletop framework (ReacTIVision), providing the host application with high processed data about each playing piece involved in the game. To support the framework application, a Graphic Assistant tool enables the designer to visually model all the playing pieces into tangible tokens that can be tracked and controlled by the framework software. As a practical example, the complete process of prototyping a tangible game is described.

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