The device is a sphere split in half where rods stick out from the center. These buttons can be pushed in and out. When the center rod is pushed in at one end, the rod on the other end moves up. If the rod is pulled out, the other moves down.
Source: Ogawa, H., Ando, N., and Onodera, S. 2005. SmallConnection: Designing of Tangible Communication Media over Networks. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA’05). ACM Press, 1073–1074.
