boink
"Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms" - Ishi, Ullmer
I agree that manipulating physical rather than virtual objects is more natural and intuitive. It is not surprising however, that Ishi's first tangible works consisted of ideas being extrapolated from virtual paradigms back onto physical ones. Could Ishi have jumped to an entirely new physical paradigm without this intermediate stage?
"Getting a Grip on Tangible Interaction: A Framework on Physical Space and Social Interaction" - Hornecker, Buur
"too many tangible interfaces aim for direct one-to-one
mappings, remaining literal and missing out opportunities
for employing magical metaphors or for providing the user
with computational re-representations of information [26]
and transformations of input (highlighted by the theory of
distributed cognition [16, 23, 25])" (Hornecker and Buur, 4)
I wonder if this approach would actually work with task-oreiented scenarios. It seems logical for an arts interaction, which is trying to portray abstract meaning which can be interpreted differently by various individuals, but abstracting specific tasks can be problematic. As with the Clavier, users are using their entire bodies but essentially are just triggering "buttons" - there is no real complex movement being interpreted by the system.
"From Interaction to Participation: Configuring Space
through Embodied Interaction" - Williams, Kabisch, and Dourish
"We also noted a woman who put the compass up to her ear, as if expecting the sound to emanate directly from it. These were the most noticeable illustrations of the general tendency to focus on the physical objects as the source of the sounds and regard the digital system as transparent. Universally, when a participant’s attention was attracted by a sound associated with a certain object, they turned not towards the physical source of the sound – the speakers – but to the causal source of the sound, the object." (14)
I wonder as we try and apply computation onto physical objects, as we are accustomed to actual objects emitting sounds, rather than audio feedback coming from somewhere else, how we can design systems to make participants understand the goal of a system, without explicitly stating it. Obviously with this work, exploration was intended. As noted by the authors, this correlation of sound to action is confusing if auditory feedback is coming from somewhere else, but their intentions were to create a system to use objects to collaborate with a system as a whole. I guess i dont really have a point.