Tangible needle, digital haystack

Proceedings of the …, 2010

This paper presents the development of rapid and reusable gestural interface prototypes for navigation by similarity in an audio database and for sound manipulation, using the AudioCycle application. For this purpose, we propose and follow guidelines for rapid prototyping that we apply using the PureData visual programming environment. We have mainly developed three prototypes of manual control: one combining a 3D mouse and a jog wheel, a second featuring a force-feedback 3D mouse, and a third taking advantage of the multitouch trackpad. We discuss benefits and shortcomings we experienced while prototyping using this approach.

2009

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018

We introduce here a tangible user interface implemented by passing objects between a human and a computer. This interface deals with realization and virtualization: when we realize an object, it disappears from the screen and we get a real object out of the screen, as it were. Virtualization is the opposite action: we pass real object into the user interface, it disappears, and we get a virtual object on the screen. Our experiment included a grocery shop game with a coin machine as an input-output device. The virtual money that was earned in the game was realized as metal coins. The metal coins paid into the user interface were represented virtually on the computer screen. The experiment included two ages groups: adults and children 6–8 years old. Reference groups played the same game without tangible components, i.e. all the money in the game was virtual (a common implementation in the game industry). Adults bought less products in the version with tangible interface, and the decision period was longer in that case. The children’s results were completely different: they bought many more products when playing the game with the tangible interface (about 3 times more). Children perceived the game with tangible interface as a totally different game: intuitively understandable and more engaging. These results accord with cognitive theory, and we are look forward to further research studying the effectiveness of the use of tangible user interfaces.

2006

A new Tangible User Interface (TUI) device, m-ActiveCube, is proposed as a multimedia extension of ActiveCube, which is a TUI device that enables more efficient human computer interaction than conventional devices. First, fundamental specifications of m-ActiveCube are determined to remove the processing performance and functionality limitation of the original ActiveCube. By utilizing improved performance, m-ActiveCube offers such novel functionalities as speech recognition with which more impressive applications can be constructed at any level of human living system.

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in order to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge.

2009

CHI'08 extended abstracts on Human factors in …, 2008

For more than half a century, musicians used artwork as a way of visually describing the contents of an album. "Cover art" attracts attention, reminds the listener of the contents, and when printed on the album cover, provides a tangible representation of the music that's easily used for organization and sharing. Over the past few decades, the benefits of the physical album "package" were lost as it changed from a 12 inch vinyl album to an electronic file and thumbnail image downloaded from an online music store. In this demonstration we present a tangible user interface called iCandy that restores the benefits of physical albums for the electronic music in the iTunes multimedia application and provides a method for easy access to recorded media. The system also includes several desktop visualizations that enhance the overall experience especially when dealing with large collections of music and video.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

This paper aims to present a framework for collaborative design environments during the manipulation of multimedia content. The proposed desktop system can be assumed as an imitation of physical desktop including three additional properties: a tangible timeline layer, a projection of 2D plan and 3D perspective views which can be controlled through specified augmented reality markers. The potentials of this desktop application, such as unfoldable experience of time via a timeline, multi-touch manipulation and organisation of 2D and 3D visual data, were explored for the further augmented reality studies.

Ibm Systems Journal, 2000

For more than thirty years, people have relied primarily on screen-based text and graphics to interact with computers. Whether the screen is placed on a desk, held in one's hand, worn on one's head, or embedded in the physical environment, the screen has cultivated a predominantly visual paradigm of human-computer interaction. In this chapter, we discuss a growing space of interfaces in which physical objects play a central role as both physical representations and controls for digital information. We present an interaction model and key characteristics for such "tangible user interfaces," and explore these characteristics in a number of interface examples. This discussion supports a newly integrated view of both recent and previous work, and points the way towards new kinds of computationally-mediated interfaces that more seamlessly weave together the physical and digital worlds.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

The last ten years have seen an explosion in the diversity of digital-life devices, e.g. music and video players. However, the interaction paradigm to use these devices has remained mostly unchanged. Remote controls are still the most common way to manage a digital-life device. Moreover, the interaction between devices themselves is still very limited and rarely addressed by a remote control interface. We present in this paper a study of tangible drag-and-drop, a remote control interface based on the well-known paradigm coming from the graphical user interface. This interaction technique aims at reducing the gap between the digital and physical worlds, enabling the transfer of digital data from one device to another. To validate such a concept, we present two prototypes, along with user studies and a general discussion about the tangible drag-anddrop technique.