A simple definition of Tangible User Interface, from hereon referred to as TUI, is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment. TUI is something I have only very recently rediscovered. Some time ago, I did read an article about it, but only now after reading these academic papers, I have found out that this field is growing very quickly with a lot of people working on it to come up with newer and more innovative solutions.
The idea is quite simple: use physical objects (sometimes even tools we use every day) in order to interact and work with computers. This concept means that through the use of technologies like computer vision, tracking devices, touch screens etc., the system is able to know how the user is manipulating a collection of physical objects, and then able to translate these actions into events in the computer interface.
The 'Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms' paper by Hiroshi Ishii is considered one of the pioneering publications in the field and the author referred to as the parent of TUI. Professor Hiroshi Ishii is in fact, the leader of one of the most important research groups working on this area, the tangible media group at MIT. If you want to see how a group of researchers can combine work and fun, research and pleasure, visit their website and see some of the projects they have developed and are currently working on.
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/
Some of the videos on the website are exciting and a lotta fun to watch and learn. Although it is clear that TUI has a great future, there's still a lot to do in order to see real TUI applications. The key is to be able to find something clearly easier to do with a TUI than with any other approach.
The paper on Tangible Interaction by Eva Hornecker addresses an important issue in the field of tangible interactions: the lack of proper design methodologies/principles/knowledge. The principles they consider aims at providing 'guidance' to both design decisions and conception of the design process as well as creating a context for an interaction experience (rather than focusing on simply technological/ergonomic issues).
What impressed me the most though was the attempt by the researchers to try and design interaction as a whole rather than just designing an interface, which puts the entire human and social interaction point of view into perspective. The framework proposed here looks to be comprehensive in addressing all the necessary aspects of tangible interaction giving appropriate attention to detail in every one of the 'themes'. It is evident from this reading that without considering the user experience criteria of tangible interaction, which has not been paid too much attention to in the past, it is not possible to come up with an effective design process for TUI based systems.
Something interesting I found online and wanted to share with the class - Tangint , a new wiki, has been launched to serve the international community of researchers, designers, artists, and other practioners in the area of tangible interfaces and, more generally, tangible interaction. The Tangint editors are Brygg Ullmer of the Tangible Visualization group, Louisana State University; Eva Hornecker of the Interact Lab, University of Sussex and Albrecht Schmidt of the Embedded Interaction group, University of Munich.
http://wiki.cct.lsu.edu/tangint/space/start
Interaction Design concerns the interaction between people and products in which information technology is a central component. This can, for instance, be the design of the complex interface between the driver and the network of computers controlling a modern car, the interface and gameplay of modern computer games, the next generation of mobile communication devices or the integration of computational technology into our everyday things, such as ’intelligent clothes’. Regardless of application area, a design perspective on the interaction between people and technology is central. This makes interaction design an increasingly important area in application and systems development, as well as in industrial and product design.
'Thinking through Doing' - I guess at some level I have always been a supporter and a follower of that. And especially in the case of Interaction design, what better way can there be to positively conclude how interactions are going to take place and how an application should be constructed to meet those interactions in the required fashion. The paper also talks about many other aspects of the human interaction that we normally take for granted and tend to utilise at a subconscious level such as action-centered skills, motor memory or situation based learning. As tough as it is, the best interaction design would and should definitely take into account all of these factors and in essence design a system such is infact the world in which the person interacts. In other words, the user should never be intended to do anything that he would normally NOT do - in the world, during his/her day - and also do what he would without having to externalize himself from the system - in essence, 'live the system'. I guess this is a far fetched goal but atleast now we have something to progress towards - in my opinion, a 'liveable' design !
I found the 'From Hand-held to Body-worn' paper by Jin Moen to be interesting and at the same time quite amusing. Movement interaction is obviously a very integral part of tangible interaction since most forms of human interactions are inherently based on motion. Although most of us conceive a majority of our interactions to be hand-based, it is important in the overall picture to look at the entire body as one, whole entity capable of tangible interaction.
Agreed - a people oriented approach is definitely important in working towards movement or gestural interactions, but is that the primary concern ? The first time I saw an ad for the new Nintendo Wii on TV, I was amazed - how did they design those movements and figure out a way to express them so realistically on the screen ? And the more I thought about it, I kept coming back to the fact that the most critical step in solving that problem was to come up with the gestural grammar/vocabulary - how to describe those movements (both the physical ones and the translations into their virtual counterparts) That is why the author of this paper picked modern dance to conduct his study - there is a predefined vocabulary of movements to base the interaction on.
I do like the time-space-force theory for movement definiton and the BodyBug prototype although its pretty simple and hardly accurate. But I do believe that more such case studies need to conducted on simple movements with people in real-life situations, where they behave like they normally would in their own environment. This would give us a better understanding of movement interaction in terms of designing systems that are intended to invisibly exist in the user's world. Also, considerable effort has to go into accurately and effectively mapping physical movements into the digital realm. Some of the other issues that concern movement interactions are public vs private spaces and multi-user interactions.
This is my first blog ever and the first blog of the class, so please forgive me for any 'un-blog-like' language. I only hope to get better as the quarter progresses.
Arun.