GAINE — tanGible augmented interaction for edutainment

Interactive tabletops are gaining an increasing interest since they provide a more natural interaction with digital contents and allow the interaction of multiple users at a time promoting face-to-face collaboration, information sharing and the raise of social experiences. Given the potentialities offered by these devices, several entertainment-edutainment applications based on interactive tabletops have been successfully developed in different areas, from medical therapy support to children's collaborative learning, interactive storytelling and cultural heritage. However, the development of such applications often requires complex technical and implementation skills. Taking this into consideration, in this paper we present GAINE (tanGible Augmented INteraction for Edutainment), a software framework aimed at the rapid prototyping and development of interactive tabletop games. GAINE offers developers context specific high-level constructs and a simple scripting language that simplifies the implementation task. The framework is portable on different operating systems and offers independence from the underlying hardware. Two practical case studies are thoroughly discussed to show how GAINE can simplify the development of interactive tabletop applications in the entertainment and edutainment contexts.