Recent experiments show video games have a range of positive cognitive effects, such as improvement in attention, spatial cognition and mental rotation, and also overcoming of cognitive disabilities such as fear of flying. Further, game environments are now being used to generate scientific discoveries, and bring about novel phenomenological effects, such as out-of-body experiences. These advances provide interesting interaction design possibilities for video games. However, since the cognitive mechanisms underlying these experimental effects are unknown, it is difficult to systematically derive novel systems and interaction designs based on these results. We review the emerging cognitive mechanism known as common coding (which proposes a common neural representation connecting execution, perception and imagination of movements), and outline how this mechanism could provide an integrated account of the cognitive effects of video games. We then illustrate, using two ongoing projects, how novel video game interaction designs could be derived by extending common coding theory.

The physical and social cues on which we rely during collaboration can vanish in the digital realm. inSpace focuses on physical-digital codesign, leveraging an approach grounded in social behavior patterns.

We describe the design and development of PuzzleTale, an interactive storytelling system that makes use of tangible puzzle pieces on the surface of an interactive table. In the PuzzleTale system, assembling the tangible puzzle piece can affect the digital characters and create a flexible story context. Different assembled patterns represent the diverse ways that users explore and compose the story. The PuzzleTale system creates a dynamic causal relationship between the process of interactive storytelling and the outcome of a story. There are two variables that continuously affect the story context including the amount and the sequence of digital characters that the reader plays. The system engages the reader participating in the development of the story through playing tangible puzzle pieces with digital characters as a decision-making tool, thus providing individualized storytelling experiences.

Tangible interaction is a growing area of human–computer interaction research that has become popular in recent years. Yet designers and researchers are still trying to comprehend and clarify its nature, characteristics, and implications. One approach has been to create frameworks that help us look back at and categorize past tangible interaction systems, and look forward at the possibilities and opportunities for developing new systems. To date, a number of different frameworks have been proposed that each provide different perspectives on the tangible interaction design space, and which can guide designers of new systems in different ways. In this paper, we map the space of tangible interaction frameworks.We order existing frameworks by their general type, and by the facets of tangible interaction design they address. One of our main conclusions is that most frameworks focus predominantly on the conceptual design of tangible systems, whereas fewer frameworks abstract the knowledge gained from previous systems, and hardly any framework provides concrete steps or tools for building new tangible systems. In addition, the facets most represented in existing frameworks are those that address the interactions with or the physicality of the designed systems. Other facets, such as domain-specific technology and experience, are rare. This focus on design, interaction, and physicality is interesting, as the origins of the field are rooted in engineering methods and have only recently started to incorporate more design-inspired approaches. As such, we expected more frameworks to focus on technologies and to provide concrete building suggestions for new tangible interaction systems.

The International Conference Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI) is the first conference with "tangible" in its title, motivated by the field’s growth over the past decade. One of this research area's most fascinating features is the range of perspectives and disciplines, including HCI, the arts, design, technology, and architecture. TEI invites a multi- and interdisciplinary community to submit contributions from their specific viewpoints and approaches. It brings together artists who employ tangible media with computer engineers developing toolkits, physical appliance designers with researchers conducting user studies, and researchers exploring novel interface technologies with interaction designers who develop mixed-media systems.

The TViews Table Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) is a digital tabletop role-playing game that runs on the TViews table, bridging the separate worlds of traditional role-playing games with the growing area of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The TViews table is an interactive tabletop media platform that can track the location of multiple tagged objects in real-time as they are moved around its surface, providing a simultaneous and coincident graphical display. In this paper we present the implementation of the first version of TTRPG, with a content set based on the traditional Dungeons & Dragons rule-set. We also discuss the results of a user study that used TTRPG to explore the possible social context of digital tabletop role-playing games.

TViews is an extensible method and acoustic-based sensing framework for creating digital media tables that overcome many limitations of singlepurpose systems. The system provides a means for real-time multiobject tracking on the tabletop and for the management of large numbers of objects and applications across multiple platform instances.