tangible user interfaces

Tangible User Interfaces

I've stumbled upon a whole new realm of possibilities for an exciting

research area: tangible user interfaces!

A tangible user interface is, according to our friends at Wikipedia,

nothing more than "a user interface in which a person interacts with

digital information through the physical environment." Such a simple

little concept at first glance, but one that I think will eventually

become a standard paradigm for human-computer interactions. There are

so many applications that simply make more sense when a user interacts

with something real, something they understand without a second

thought.

For example, many of us have heard of Microsoft Surface by now (if

not, check out this video for a really good overview of what it can

do). The fact that it can be controlled with such tangible mediums as

your own bare hands, everyday store bought items, and other custom

tagged objects really opens a whole new world of possibility for

interactivity. It's a shame that in the foreseeable future systems

like this are likely to remain accessible only in commercial settings

(using the cost of $15k as a good starting reason). Even when they are

available to home users, a lot of reworking of the software we all

know and love to fit this paradigm would be necessary. But the

eventual ease of use should be worth it!

Now here's another cool example of a tangible user interface that you

probably haven't heard of: Illuminating Clay. The creators of this

system wanted to figure out a way to bridge the physical-digital

divide that landscape architects face when they model with real clay

but compute information about their models on a computer. Their

solution? Let the architects continue to use clay, but have the

changes made in the physical world be digitized in real time, with the

results of various computations projected back onto the clay. This

image from the Illuminating Clay website gives you the idea of how

this looks:

This is probably the most novel user interface design solution I have

ever seen. It should really help demonstrate why I am so excited about

the future of tangible user interfaces! Imagine how many applications

there must be for this paradigm. (Post some comments with your ideas!)

Now, some of you may be wondering why I would be so interested in user

interfaces when my profile claims that I care about computer vision

and geometry and such. The truth is that I have had a pretty keen

interest in the effective design of user interfaces, but little time

to study it further. Pair this interest with the fact that both the

examples above, and many others beyond it, require extensive computer

vision and geometric computation techniques to bridge that gap between

the real world and the computer, and you've got a pretty attractive