Towards a Playful User Interface for Home Entertainment Systems by Florian Block is a project that aims at using a tangible cube as an input device for playfully changing between different TV-channels. It's carried out at the Embedded Interaction Research Group in Munich.

The basic idea for a new user interfaces for changing TV channels resulted of informal observations of people watching television. (...) The basic concept is to use a handy cube that allows changing the channels on TV by physical movement in a 3D-space. More specific a virtual version of the cube is shown on the television screen. On each phase of the cube a TV stream is rendered. The motion of the cube on the screen is connected to the rotation the user performs using the real cube. The user now can rotate the real cube in order to see the different sides and the TV channels respectively. If the cube is put down and not moved anymore the TV channel currently facing the user on the virtual cube is enlarged to cover the full screen. As soon as the user picks the cube up again the currently showing channel is resized back to the facing site of the virtual cube. Other channels are shown on the other sides of the cube.