Customizable physical interfaces for interacting with conventional applications

When using today's productivity applications, people rely heavily on graphical controls (GUI widgets) as the way to invoke application functions and to obtain feedback. Yet we all know that certain controls can be difficult or tedious to find and use. As an alternative, a customizable physical interface lets an end-user easily bind a modest number of physical controls to similar graphical counterparts. The user can then use the physical control to invoke the corresponding graphical control's function, or to display its graphical state in a physical form. To show how customizable physical interfaces work, we present examples that illustrate how our combined phidgets® and widget tap packages are used to link existing application widgets to physical controls. While promising, our implementation prompts a number of issues relevant to others pursuing interface customization.