Tangible Bits
An academic article from 1997, summarized in 2006, and still relevant in 2018.
I found this article summary that I wrote up over a decade ago about an article written a decade before that, and it feels just as relevant today as it did 10 and 20 years ago. Oh how things change, yet still stay the same. Fast and slow.
Tangible user interfaces and augmented reality go hand in hand, along with the continuum from real reality to virtual reality.
[Article Summary] Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms
Tangible Bits focuses on introducing haptic and ambient information to the personal computer experience. This moves the user away from typical GUI interfaces, to an interface that exists around them, in the physical objects and environment. These Tangible User Interfaces (TUI)s would utilize three key factors: interactive surfaces, coupling everyday graspable objects with their digital information, and engaging the periphery of the user’s perception with ambient media (sound, light, airflow, water movement). The ambient media is meant to be a background interface, which the user is not focused on, but can be aware of.
Tangible Bits explores these three factors though metaDESK, transBOARD, and ambientROOM. Phicons are physical objects that represent the GUI icons and widgets users have become accustom to in personal computers, which are used to interact on the metaDESK. As an augmented whiteboard, the transBOARD allows users to save their whiteboard session and retrieve it for later viewing. The ambientROOM explores different ways of providing a background interface, and thus far has found that the sound of raindrops can be distracting, but the projection of water ripples on the ceiling is better
received for this purpose.
The ambient aspect of this research aims to supply the user with more information, drawing from how people get ambient information about the weather and their coworkers. Ironically, the current prototype strips away the user’s current ambient information because it isolates them from the weather and their coworkers, replacing it with artificial ambient media.
