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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. One of the pioneers 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. Physical representations are computationally coupled to underlying digital information. Physical representations embody mechanisms for interactive control. Physical representations are perceptually coupled to actively mediated digital representations. Physical state of tangibles embodies key aspects of the digital state of a system According to Mi Jeong Kim and Mary Lou Maher, the five basic defining properties of tangible user interfaces are as follows: space-multiplex both input and output; concurrent access and manipulation of interface components; strong specific devices; spatially aware computational devices; spatial re-configurability of devices. 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.

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: Prior work has successfully described how low and high-performing dyads of students differ in terms of their visual synchronization (e.g., Barron, 2000; Jermann, Mullins, Nuessli & Dillenbourg, 2011). But there is far less work analyzing the diversity of ways that successful groups of students use to achieve visual coordination. The goal of this paper is to illustrate how well-coordinated groups establish and sustain joint visual attention by unpacking their different strategies and behaviors. Our data was collected in a dual eye-tracking setup where dyads of students (N=54) had to interact with a Tangible User Interface (TUI). We selected two groups of students displaying high levels of joint visual attention and compared them using cross-recurrence graphs displaying moments of joint attention from the eye-tracking data, speech data, and by qualitatively analyzing videos generated for that purpose. We found that greater insights can be found by augmenting cross-recurrence graphs with spatial and verbal data, and that high levels of joint visual attention can hide a free-rider effect (Salomon & Globerson, 1989). We conclude by discussing implications for automatically analyzing students’ interactions using dual eye-trackers.

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