Tangible linker: Organizing and accessing digital contents using untagged tangible objects

Retrieving digital contents consists in some searching operation, which requires some memory effort and can be challenging due to the large amount of contents stored by users. Bookmarks and shortcuts are commonly used to ease the process however in a short term they show the same inconveniences above. We propose a novel solution based on tangible media for mapping multiple digital contents using untagged physical objects. Users can map different kinds of related digital contents, regardless their sources, with physical objects and access directly the desired contents without requiring any search operation. Objects in our system require no modifications; instead we use computer vision for object detection and recognition using a conventional web camera. In our implementation, when an object is placed in front of the screen it becomes part of the computer desktop and can be used to retrieve information. We performed an evaluation experiment and results of the evaluation showed that most users found the system easy to use and the interface intuitive.