Осязаемые пользовательские интерфейсы: соединяя цифровой и физический мир.

A tangible user interface (TUI) is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment. The initial name was Graspable User Interface, which is no longer used. The purpose of TUI development is to empower collaboration, learning, and design by giving physical forms to digital information, thus taking advantage of the human ability to grasp and manipulate physical objects and materials. This was first conceived by Radia Perlman as a new programming language that would teach much younger children similar to Logo, but using special "keyboards" and input devices. Another pioneer in tangible user interfaces is Hiroshi Ishii, a professor at the MIT who heads the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. His particular vision for tangible UIs, called Tangible Bits, is to give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Tangible bits pursues the seamless coupling between physical objects and virtual data.

A tangible user interface must be differentiated from a graphical user interface (GUI). A GUI exists only in the digital world, whereas a TUI connects the digital with the physical world. For example, a screen displays the digital information, whereas a mouse allows us to directly interact with this digital information. A tangible user interface represents the input directly in the physical world, and makes the digital information directly graspable. A tangible user interface is usually built for one specific target group, because of the low range of possible application areas. Therefore, the design of the interface must be developed together with the target group to ensure a good user experience. In comparison with a TUI, a GUI has a wide range of usages in one interface. Because of that it targets a large group of possible users. A marble represents a single message left on the answering machine. Dropping a marble into a dish plays back the associated message or calls back the caller. The Topobo system. The blocks in Topobo are like LEGO blocks which can be snapped together, but can also move by themselves using motorized components. A person can push, pull, and twist these blocks, and the blocks can memorize these movements and replay them. Implementations which allow the user to sketch a picture on the system's table top with a real tangible pen. Using hand gestures, the user can clone the image and stretch it in the X and Y axes just as one would in a paint program. This system would integrate a video camera with a gesture recognition system. jive. The implementation of a TUI helped make this product more accessible to elderly users of the product. The 'friend' passes can also be used to activate different interactions with the product. a projection augmented model. SandScape: Designing landscape with TUI. This interface lets the user form a landscape out of sand on a table. The sand model represents the terrain, which is projected on the surface. In real time the model projects the deformations of the sand.

Interest in tangible user interfaces (TUIs) has grown constantly since the 1990s, and with every year, more tangible systems are showing up. A 2017 white paper outlines the evolution of TUIs for touch table experiences and raises new possibilities for experimentation and development. In 1999, Gary Zalewski patented a system of moveable children's blocks containing sensors and displays for teaching spelling and sentence composition. Tangible Engine is a proprietary authoring application used to build object recognition interfaces for projected capacitive touch tables. The Tangible Engine Media Creator allows users with little or no coding experience to quickly create TUI based experiences. The MIT Tangible Media Group, headed by Hiroshi Ishi is continuously developing and experimenting with TUIs including many tabletop applications. The Urp system and the more advanced Augmented Urban Planning Workbench allow digital simulations of air flow, shadows, reflections, and other data based on the positions and orientations of physical models of buildings, on the table surface. Newer developments go even one step further and incorporate the third dimension by allowing a user to form landscapes with clay (Illuminating Clay) or sand (Sand Scape). Again different simulations allow the analysis of shadows, height maps, slopes and other characteristics of the interactively formable landmasses. InfrActables is a back projection collaborative table that allows interaction by using TUIs that incorporate state recognition. Adding different buttons to the TUIs enables additional functions associated to the TUIs. Newer versions of the technology can even be integrated into LC displays by using infrared sensors behind the LC matrix. The Tangible Disaster allows the user to analyze disaster measures and simulate different kinds of disasters (fire, flood, tsunami,.) and evacuation scenarios during collaborative planning sessions. Physical objects allow positioning disasters by placing them on the interactive map and additionally tuning parameters (i. e. scale) using dials attached to them. The commercial potential of TUIs has been identified recently. The repeatedly awarded Reactable, an interactive tangible tabletop instrument, is now distributed commercially by Reactable Systems, a spinoff company of the Pompeu Fabra University, where it was developed. With the Reactable users can set up their own instrument interactively, by physically placing different objects (representing oscillators, filters, modulators ) and parametrise them by rotating and using touch input. Microsoft is distributing its novel Windows based platform Microsoft Surface (now Microsoft PixelSense) since 2009. Beside multi touch tracking of fingers, the platform supports the recognition of physical objects by their footprints. Several applications, mainly for the use in commercial space, have been presented. Examples range from designing an own individual graphical layout for a snowboard or skateboard to studying the details of a wine in a restaurant by placing it on the table and navigating through menus via touch input. Interactions such as the collaborative browsing of photographs from a handycam or cell phone that connects seamlessly once placed on the table are also supported. Another notable interactive installation is instant city that combines gaming, music, architecture and collaborative aspects. It allows the user to build three dimensional structures and set up a city with rectangular building blocks, which simultaneously results in the interactive assembly of musical fragments of different composers. The development of the Reactable and the subsequent release of its tracking technology reacTIVision under the GNU/GPL as well as the open specifications of the TUIO protocol have triggered an enormous amount of developments based on this technology. In the last few years, many amateur and semi professional projects outside of academia and commerce have been started. Due to open source tracking technologies (reacTIVision

The Tangible Factory Planning is a tangible table based on reacTIVision and was on exhibition at the Bauhaus University in Weimar marking the 90th anniversary of the establishment of Bauhaus. Visitors could browse and explore the biographies, complex relations and social networks between members of the movement. Using principles derived from embodied cognition, cognitive load theory, and embodied design TUIs have been shown to increase learning performance by offering multimodal feedback. However, these benefits for learning require forms of interaction design that leave as much cognitive capacity as possible for learning.

A physical icon, or phicon, is the tangible computing equivalent of an icon in a traditional graphical user interface, or GUI. Phicons hold a reference to some digital object and thereby convey meaning.

Physical icons were first used as tangible interfaces in the metaDesk project built in 1997 by Professor Hiroshi Ishii's tangible bits research group at MIT. The metaDesk consisted of a table whose surface showed a rear projected video image. Placing a phicon on the table triggered sensors that altered the video projection.