Abstract
Toys are play products designed for leisure and social play activities. Today, play products increasingly incorporate hardware and software computation, often connecting to online services and other computing devices, thus being commonly referred to as “smart toys.” Accordingly, such products can also be categorized as user interfaces as they allow human interaction with digital contents using the physical toys’ inputs and outputs. Here we propose the idea of Toy-User-Interfaces (ToyUI) and relate them to the domains of human-computer interaction, mixed reality, and the Internet of Things. We surveyed and categorized a multitude of ToyUIs, gathering information from research papers and toy companies by performing both a systematic mapping (covering research from 2008 to 2017) and an industrial mapping (covering releases from 2012 to 2017). The resulting 297 items were then analyzed according to our classification model, being divided into four categories, eight genres, and 22 setups, considering the play features and the interface features of such items. The classification model and the analysis of the results allowed us to identify six trends in design and technology for ToyUI. Ultimately, our research findings may guide the future of ToyUI projects for researchers, designers, educators, therapists, and end-users.
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