NFC-based Tangible User Interface for Information Curation and Its Application to Analogy Game

This paper applies a Tangible User Interface (TUI) for information curation using Near Field Communication (NFC) to an analogy game. The increase in text data is more remarkable in current IT society. Although those are usually accessed with using Graphical User Interface (GUI), users except experienced computer users have difficulty in reading and organizing data with GUI. In particular, information curation such as grouping related data / information and finding relationship among them is difficult. In order to solve this problem, an interface that can access text data intuitively is expected. We are developing a TUI based on NFC, by which a user can move and group text data in a similar manner when handling paper documents. As one of the promising applications of the proposed TUI, this paper focuses on creative thinking support, for which touching externalized thought by hand is expected to be effective. An experiment is conducted, in which test participants did an analogy game with using the proposed TUI. The experimental result shows experience of using the TUI affects the participants’ self-evaluation about idea creation