Comparing and contrasting manual direct touch interaction with tangible user interfaces for mapping applications

Multi-touch interfaces are growing in popularity for many forms of computing devices, including mobile devices, as well as personal and shared workstations. There has been limited exploration into the use of tangible user interfaces in conjunction with multi-touch displays for extracting data from geocoded data. Specifically, it is not known if tangible user interfaces are faster, easier or more intuitive to use than existing touch based controls. We hypothesize that tangible user interfaces will be faster, more satisfying and more desirable than touch based controls for extracting data from geocoded data. We set out to explore one tangible user interface and two touch based interfaces as inputs to a new mapping application.