First some advancement in touch input devices:
May 24, 2012
April 17, 2011
Tangible widgets for touch screens
A team of researchers from RWTH Aachen University and University of California, San Diego created some widgets to extend multi-touch tables with tactile feedback.
In addition to that one is able to create new forms of interaction by the combination of hardware and software. So it’s a nice new user interface technology. But with that you can or maybe sometimes need to have different devices / widgets at once. Where to place them when you need them and when you don’t need them? Probably these devices can get lost and become dirty quickly. But they are a good possibility to close the gap between software and hardware user interfaces respectively to fuse both ways so it would be perceived as one consistent interface.
[hci.rwth-aachen.de: SLAP]