Tangible Palette

Overview

The aim of this project is to implement a Mixed Interactive Technique to support the user's interaction with a 3D hierarchical structure. This structure is made of "nodes" and "edges". Each node is associated to a picture of an animal. Each node may have sub-nodes.

Possible actions that a user may want to apply on this 3D structures are for example:

• displaying the pitures associated to a selectes node
• rotating a sub part of the tree, i.e. rotating the sub-nodes
• hiding / showing the sub-tree of a selected node

In order to present these commands to the user, we propose to use a palette, similar to the one used by a painter: on this physical palette, the different commands are positioned. Selecting this command relies on pointing a physical selector on this command, as if the painter points his brush on a given color paint.
The role of the palette is thus twofold:

• physical artefact for manipulating the digital pointer in the 3D tree
• physical support for groupong useful digital command