Most mobile devices provide limited input interfaces in order to maximize the mobility and the portability. In this paper, the author proposes a small cubic-shaped tangible input interface which tracks the location, the direction, and the velocity using MEMS sensor technology to overcome the physical limitations of the poor input devices in mobile computing environments. As the preliminary phase for implementing the proposed tangible input interface, the prototype design and implementation methods are described in this paper. Various experiments such as menu manipulation, 3-dimensional contents control, and sensor data visualization have been performed in order to verify the validity of the proposed interface. The proposed tangible device enables direct and intuitive manipulation. It is obvious that the mobile computing will be more widespread and various kinds of new contents will emerge in near future. The proposed interface can be successfully employed for the new contents services that cannot be easily implemented because of the limitation of current input devices. It is also obvious that this kind of interface will be a critical component for future mobile communication environments. The proposed tangible interface will be further improved to be applied to various contents manipulation including 2D/3D games.
