A French multidisciplinary project-team named AVIZ seeks to improve analysis and visualization of large, complex datasets by tightly integrating analysis methods with interactive visualization. This particular project describes the design and implementation of SmartTokens and illustrate how they can be used in practice by introducing a novel tangible user interface design for event notification and personal task management. 
SmartTokens are small-sized tangible tokens that can sense multiple types of motion, multiple types of touch/grip, and send input events wirelessly as state-machine transitions. By providing an open platform for embedding basic sensing capabilities within small form-factors, SmartTokens extend the design space of tangible user interfaces.
 

This notification machine is only one example. One can easily imagine using SmartTokens with different form factors to create interactive board games or for physical data storytelling. So if you have any other ideas for applications or if you want to improve the technology, SmartTokens are completely open source. All material to make and use SmartToken (pdf) is available to download on Github.

We soon hope to report on more recent and brilliant work by the same team on the following topic: Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces (by Mathieu Le Goc, Lawrence Kim, Ali Parsaei, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, Sean Follmer in Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST 2016), June 2016, Tokyo, Japan (not yet published)