entertaible

no, that's not a typo. I recently came across a research project by Philips called the Entertaible, a tangible interface for a tabletop electronic game board (thanks to Rose for the link). there's not really anything technologically revolutionary going on here, but it's good to see some of these research ideas in something that may end up being a commercial product. I'm also a big fan of the new Nintendo Revolution Controller, in that whether or not it succeeds it's bringing tangible interfaces into commercial products. another example is the accelerometers in Toshiba's and some others' tablet PCs, but my experiences say those are less well used.

ultimately, though, this is all sort of for play. what are some good applications of tangible interfaces that can be seen as "practical" applications? I'm sure they exist, for example tangible interfaces for video or image editing, or possible manipulation of large spread sheets or databases. tangible computing has a lot of power in its ability to make interactions much more intuitive, and while it's not quite universal, it's nice to see it making its way into commercial products of any sort.