O-Key: A Scoopable Interface

Nowadays computers are considered a common tool for everyday activities, including document management and message communication. This in turn requests us to carefully design computers so that anyone can use them without any special skill. Augmented/mixed reality and tangible interface would be promising toward the development of such daily use interface systems. In this paper, we propose a new interface which is named O-Key. O-Key allows the user with his/her hands to scoop up objects which are virtually floating on the water in a bucket. A certain function associated with the selected objects is activated. An experiment showed that the proposed interface works effectively. Possible application scenarios of the interface system are also presented