Authors: Sophie Lepreux ¹; Julien Castet ²; Nadine Couture ^3,4; Emmanuel Dubois ^5,6; Christophe Kolski ¹; Sébastien Kubicki ⁷; Valérie Maquil ⁸; Guillaume Riviere ^3,4

• 1 Laboratoire d'Automatique, de Mécanique et d'Informatique industrielles et Humaines - UMR 8201
• 2 Immersion [Bordeaux]
• 3 ESTIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
• 4 Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
• 5 Etude de L’Interaction Personne SystèmE
• 6 Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
• 7 Lab-STICC_ENIB_CID_IHSEV
• 8 Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology

In recent years, tangible user interfaces, which imply interactions performed with one or several objects, gain more and more interest in research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The tangible object represents a subject or an action. It acts on the system, as an action in classical user interfaces (e.g,. GUI). Interaction on a table, which is a common furniture in everyday life and used in multiple activities (desktop, coffee table, kitchen table, etc.), opens a new way for research and development in HCI. In this article, we present definitions, models, and key issues elicited from the literature that enable understanding and reasoning about the couple < interactive tabletop, tangible object> within an interactive system. Then, we propose a framework that allows to characterize applications supported by the couple <interactive tabletop, tangible object> in a domain-independent manner.