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Tangible User Interface
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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 .
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Encyclopedia
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 . 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 , 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 tangible user interfaces (TUI). 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.
External links
- Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer, . Published in the Proceedings of , Denver, CO.
- A Magnetic Tangible user interface that uses friend passes to load information on the screen.
- : Wiki for drawing together content and discussion related to research on tangible interfaces/interaction.
- : a toolkit for building tangible UIs
- : Tangible interface for exploring sound/music
- : a framework for creating tangible UIs
- : Integrating paper and digital information
- : a composition and performance instrument
- : Memodules as tangible shortcuts to multimedia information
- : A Tangible Interactive Natural Environment which merges tabletop interfaces and smart objects
- : A collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface.
- : Tangible Web Project
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