Tangible user interface
A tangible user interface (TUI) is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment. The initial name was Graspable User Interface, which no longer is used.
One of the pioneers in tangible user interfaces is Hiroshi Ishii, a professor in the MIT Media Laboratory who heads the Tangible Media Group. His particular vision for tangible UIs, called Tangible Bits,
is to give physical form to digital information, making bits directly
manipulable and perceptible. Tangible bits pursues seamless coupling
between these two very different worlds of bits and atoms.
Characteristics of tangible user interfaces
- Physical representations are computationally coupled to underlying digital information.
- Physical representations embody mechanisms for interactive control.
- Physical representations are perceptually coupled to actively mediated digital representations.
- Physical state of tangibles embodies key aspects of the digital state of a system
Examples
An example of a tangible UI is the Marble Answering Machine by Durrell Bishop (1992). A marble represents a single message left on the answering machine. Dropping a marble into a dish plays back the associated message or calls back the caller.
Another example is the Topobo system. The blocks in Topobo are like LEGO blocks
which can be snapped together, but can also move by themselves using
motorized components. A person can push, pull, and twist these blocks,
and the blocks can memorize these movements and replay them.
Another implementation allows the user to sketch a picture on the
system's table top with a real tangible pen. Using hand gestures, the
user can clone the image and stretch it in the X and Y axes just as one
would in a paint program. This system would integrate a video camera
with a gesture recognition system.
Another example is jive.
The implementation of a TUI helped make this product more accessible to
elderly users of the product. The 'friend' passes can also be used to
activate different interactions with the product.
Several approaches have been made to establish a generic middleware for
TUIs. They target toward the independence of application domains as well
as flexibility in terms of the deployed sensor technology. For
example, Siftables provides an application platform in which small gesture sensitive displays act together to form a human-computer interface.
For collaboration support TUIs have to allow the spatial distribution,
asynchronous activities, and the dynamic modification of the TUI
infrastructure, to name the most prominent ones. This approach presents a
framework based on the LINDA tuple space concept to meet these
requirements. The implemented TUIpist framework deploys arbitrary sensor technology for any type of application and actuators in distributed environments.
A further example of a type of TUI is a Projection Augmented model.
State of the art
Since the invention of Durell Bishop's Marble Answering Machine (1992)[1] two
decades ago, the interest in Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) has grown
constantly and with every year more tangible systems are showing up. In
1999 Gary Zalewski patented a system of moveable children's blocks
containing sensors and displays for teaching spelling and sentence
composition.[2] A similar system is being marketed as "Siftables".
The MIT Tangible Media Group, headed by Hiroshi Ishi is continuously
developing and experimenting with TUIs including many tabletop
applications.
The Urp[3] and the more advanced Augmented Urban Planning Workbench[4] allows
digital simulations of air flow, shadows, reflections, and other data
based on the positions and orientations of physical models of buildings,
on the table surface.
Newer developments go even one step further and incorporate the third
dimension by allowing to form landscapes with clay (Illuminating Clay[5]) or sand (Sand Scape[6]).
Again different simulations allow the analysis of shadows, height maps,
slopes and other characteristics of the interactively formable
landmasses.
InfrActables[7] is
a back projection collaborative table that allows interaction by using
TUIs that incorporate state recognition. Adding different buttons to the
TUIs enables additional functions associated to the TUIs. Newer
Versions of the technology can even be integrated into LC-displays[8] by using infrared sensors behind the LC matrix.
The Tangible Disaster[9] allows
the user to analyze disaster measures and simulate different kinds of
disasters (fire, flood, tsunami,.) and evacuation scenarios during
collaborative planning sessions. Physical objects ‚gpuckss’ allow
positioning disasters by placing them on the interactive map and
additionally tuning parameters (i.e. scale) using dials attached to
them.
Apparently the commercial potential of TUIs has been identified recently. The repeatadly awarded Reactable,[10] an
interactive tangible tabletop instrument, is now distributed
commercially by Reactable Systems, a spinoff company of the Pompeu Fabra
University, where it was developed. With the Reactable users can set up
their own instrument interactively, by physically placing different
objects (representing oscillators, filters, modulators... ) and
parametrise them by rotating and using touch-input.
Microsoft is distributing its novel Windows-based platform Microsoft Surface[11] since
last year. Beside multi touch tracking of fingers the platform supports
the recognition of physical objects by their footprints. Several
applications, mainly for the use in commercial space, have been
presented. Examples reach from designing an own individual graphical
layout for a snowboard or skateboard to studying the details of a wine
in a restaurant by placing it on the table and navigating through menus
via touch input. Also interactions like the collaborative browsing of
photographs from a handycam or cell phone that connects seamlessly once
placed on the table are supported.
Another notable interactive installation is instant city[12] that
combines gaming, music, architecture and collaborative aspects. It
allows the user to build three dimensional structures and set up a city
with rectangular building blocks, which simultaneously results in the
interactive assembly of musical fragments of different composers.
The development of the Reactable and the subsequent release of its tracking technology reacTIVision[13] under the GNU/GPL as well as the open specifications of the TUIO protocol have triggered an enormous amount of developments based on this technology.
In the last few years also many amateur and semi-professional projects,
beside academia and commerce have been started. Thanks to open source
tracking technologies (reacTIVision[13])
and the ever increasing computational power available to end-consumers,
the required infrastructure is nowadays accessible to almost everyone. A
standard PC, a web-cam, and some handicraft work allow to setup
tangible systems with a minimal programming and material effort. This
opens doors to novel ways of perception of human-computer interaction
and gives room for new forms of creativity for the broad public, to
experiment and play with.
It is difficult to keep track and overlook the rapidly growing amount of
all these systems and tools, but while many of them seem only to
utilize the available technologies and are limited to some initial
experiments and tests with some basic ideas or just reproduce existing
systems, a few of them open out into novel interfaces and interactions
and are deployed in public space or embedded in art installations.[14][15]
The Tangible Factory Planning[16] is a tangible table based on reacTIVision that
allows to collaboratively plan and visualize production processes in
combination with plans of new factory buildings and was developed within
a diploma thesis.
Another of the many reacTIVision-based tabletops is ImpulsBauhaus-Interactive Table[17] and
was on exhibition at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar marking the 90th
anniversary of the establishment of Bauhaus. Visitors could browse and
explore the biographies, complex relations and social networks between
members of the movement.
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