Sandtime: A Tangible Interaction Featured Sensory Play Installation For Children To Increase Social Connection

From the study of social-interaction enhanced gaming design, aimed at providing a public environment which supports tangible & social interactions among children, we designed Sandtime. Sandtime is a public installation designed to encourage such interaction. Using the Tangible Interaction Design approach, this gaming installation features collaborative play and social interactions under public context, where children can collaboratively interact with the virtual onscreen characters by manipulating physical objects. This design is based on the study of how interactive gaming facilities can help to ease anxiety and enhance social interactions among children. In this paper, we want to continue this line of research by exploring further the elements that can enhance such interaction experience. This paper focuses specifically on the sensory play and how it can help to facilitate social interaction

Tangible Interaction Design: Preparing Future Designers for The Needs of Industrial Innovation

The last decade has seen a remarkable uptake of interactive systems, products and services. Their design requires a shift from the traditional skills of material product-focused designers. We argue that the creativity in designing these information-enriched products needs to stress both physical properties and interactivity. The challenge is finding an educational approach that can equip industrial design graduates with stronger creativity instead of overstating the awareness of new technologies. This approach should extend rather than replace the knowledge, skills and experience from traditional design education. Using Monash University as the test bed, Tangible Interaction Design Education (TIDE), the cornerstone of this pedagogical model, provides an approach that blurs the boundaries between tangible objects and intangible services

Statefulness and Tangible interaction in Design Education

Interaction in Industrial Design is expanding from tangible realms to intangible digital experiences. In this new environment, Interaction Design provides logical sequences and behaviors that allow users to easily navigate through complex workflows. This paper discusses a framework in which interaction design provides an innovative approach to traditional industrial design. This includes the concept of ‘statefulness’, where the dynamic changes of complex systems are broken down into states that can be defined and manipulated in order to achieve a desired user experience. This framework goes beyond having physical components of a product control digital interfaces and develops experiences that jump between physical and virtual realms. The paper also describes how interaction and industrial design collaborations are put into practice in a graduate level studio course, in which students are directed by instructors with expertise in both disciplines, all working together in exploratory assignments

Sketched Reality: Sketching Bi-Directional Interactions Between Virtual and Physical Worlds with AR and Actuated Tangible UI

This paper introduces Sketched Reality, an approach that combines AR sketching and actuated tangible user interfaces (TUI) for bidirectional sketching interaction. Bi-directional sketching enables virtual sketches and physical objects to "affect" each other through physical actuation and digital computation. In the existing AR sketching, the relationship between virtual and physical worlds is only one-directional -- while physical interaction can affect virtual sketches, virtual sketches have no return effect on the physical objects or environment. In contrast, bi-directional sketching interaction allows the seamless coupling between sketches and actuated TUIs. In this paper, we employ tabletop-size small robots (Sony Toio) and an iPad-based AR sketching tool to demonstrate the concept. In our system, virtual sketches drawn and simulated on an iPad (e.g., lines, walls, pendulums, and springs) can move, actuate, collide, and constrain physical Toio robots, as if virtual sketches and the physical objects exist in the same space through seamless coupling between AR and robot motion. This paper contributes a set of novel interactions and a design space of bi-directional AR sketching. We demonstrate a series of potential applications, such as tangible physics education, explorable mechanism, tangible gaming for children, and in-situ robot programming via sketching.Comment: UIST 202

Exploring historical, social and natural heritage: challenges for tangible interaction design at Sheffied General Cemetery

This paper presents current research on the design, deployment and evaluation of tangible interaction concepts for an outdoor heritage space, the Sheffield General Cemetery. The Cemetery is an area of historical and natural importance managed and maintained by a community group. Following a co-design approach, we have conducted a series of activities at the Cemetery with the goal of developing novel physical/digital installations to support visitor experiences at the site. In this paper, we describe our work so far, particularly focusing on the “Companion Novel” – a fully operational prototype installation we have evaluated on and off site. We reflect on the challenges posed by such a complex site when developing novel tangible interactions for heritage interpretation

Exploring historical, social and natural heritage: challenges for tangible interaction design at Sheffield General Cemetery

This paper presents current research on the design, deployment and evaluation of tangible interaction concepts for an outdoor heritage space, the Sheffield General Cemetery. The Cemetery is an area of historical and natural importance managed and maintained by a community group. Following a co-design approach, we have conducted a series of activities at the Cemetery with the goal of developing novel physical/digital installations to support visitor experiences at the site. In this paper, we describe our work so far, particularly focusing on the “Companion Novel” – a fully operational prototype installation we have evaluated on and off site. We reflect on the challenges posed by such a complex site when developing novel tangible interactions for heritage interpretation

Discovery learning with tangible technologies: the case of children with intellectual disabilities

Intellectual disabilities cause significant sub--‐average achievement in learning, with difficulties in perception, attention, communication of ideas, language acquisition, abstraction and generalisation. From a socio--‐constructionist perspective, digital technologies can provide resources to help addressing these difficulties. Tangible technologies are considered particularly promising tools for children with intellectual disabilities, by enabling interaction through physical action and manipulation and facilitating representational concrete--‐ abstract links by integrating physical and digital worlds. However, hands--‐on learning activities remain a recommended but problematic approach for intellectually disabled students. This thesis investigates how and which characteristics of tangible interaction may support children with intellectual disabilities to productively engage in discovery learning. \ud Empirical studies were performed where children with intellectual disabilities used four tangible systems with distinct design characteristics. Four broad themes emerged from qualitative analysis which are central for identifying how to best support exploratory interaction: types of digital representations; physical affordances; representational mappings; and conceptual metaphors. Guidelines for the development of tangible artefacts and facilitation of discovery learning activities with tangibles were derived from these themes. A complementary quantitative analysis investigated the effects of external guidance in promoting episodes of discovery in tangible interaction. \ud This thesis argues that providing tangible interaction alone is not sufficient to bring significant benefits to the experience of intellectually disabled students in discovery learning. Visual digital representations, meaningful spatial configurations of physical representations, temporal and spatial contiguity between action and representations, simple causality and familiar conceptual metaphors are critical in providing informational intrinsic feedback to exploratory actions, which allied with external guidance that creates a minimal underlying structure for interaction, should establish an ideal environment for discovery. \u

Human bodies as interaction materials for somatic, social, and multisensory Virtual Reality experiences

Recently, the field of Human-Computer Interaction has begun to embrace the crucial role of our bodies across our cognitive and social processes. The movement of embodied interaction has been followed by a somatic and material turn that strives to design technology for richer multi-sensory somatic experiences. Despite the booming developments in tangible and wearable technologies, there is strikingly limited research exploring the potential of our own physical and virtual bodies to become the material for the design of interaction, in the same ways that tangible materials are. In this position paper, we propose a series of approaches for designing technology for social interaction, that integrate human bodies as interaction materials to elicit a multisensory embodied experience. We illustrate this approach with examples of several virtual reality experiences that we have designed for supporting social connection

Development of actuated Tangible User Interfaces: new interaction concepts and evaluation methods

Riedenklau E. Development of actuated Tangible User Interfaces: new interaction concepts and evaluation methods. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2016.Making information understandable and literally graspable is the main goal of tangible interaction research. By giving digital data physical representations (Tangible User Interface Objects, or TUIOs), they can be used and manipulated like everyday objects with the users’ natural manipulation skills. Such physical interaction is basically of uni-directional kind, directed from the user to the system, limiting the possible interaction patterns. In other words, the system has no means to actively support the physical interaction. Within the frame of tabletop tangible user interfaces, this problem was addressed by the introduction of actuated TUIOs, that are controllable by the system. Within the frame of this thesis, we present the development of our own actuated TUIOs and address multiple interaction concepts we identified as research gaps in literature on actuated Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs). Gestural interaction is a natural means for humans to non-verbally communicate using their hands. TUIs should be able to support gestural interaction, since our hands are already heavily involved in the interaction. This has rarely been investigated in literature. For a tangible social network client application, we investigate two methods for collecting user-defined gestures that our system should be able to interpret for triggering actions. Versatile systems often understand a wide palette of commands. Another approach for triggering actions is the use of menus. We explore the design space of menu metaphors used in TUIs and present our own actuated dial-based approach. Rich interaction modalities may support the understandability of the represented data and make the interaction with them more appealing, but also mean high demands on real-time precessing. We highlight new research directions for integrated feature rich and multi-modal interaction, such as graphical display, sound output, tactile feedback, our actuated menu and automatically maintained relations between actuated TUIOs within a remote collaboration application. We also tackle the introduction of further sophisticated measures for the evaluation of TUIs to provide further evidence to the theories on tangible interaction. We tested our enhanced measures within a comparative study. Since one of the key factors in effective manual interaction is speed, we benchmarked both the human hand’s manipulation speed and compare it with the capabilities of our own implementation of actuated TUIOs and the systems described in literature. After briefly discussing applications that lie beyond the scope of this thesis, we conclude with a collection of design guidelines gathered in the course of this work and integrate them together with our findings into a larger frame

Tangible interfaces for manipulating aggregates of digital information

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-269).This thesis develops new approaches for people to physically represent and interact with aggregates of digital information. These support the concept of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs), a genre of human-computer interaction that uses spatially reconfigurable physical objects as representations and controls for digital information. The thesis supports the manipulation of information aggregates through systems of physical tokens and constraints. In these interfaces, physical tokens act as containers and parameters for referencing digital information elements and aggregates. Physical constraints are then used to map structured compositions of tokens onto a variety of computational interpretations. This approach is supported through the design and implementation of several systems. The mediaBlocks system enables people to use physical blocks to "copy and paste" digital media between specialized devices and general-purpose computers, and to physically compose and edit this content (e.g., to build multimedia presentations). This system also contributes new tangible interface techniques for binding, aggregating, and disaggregating sequences of digital information into physical objects.(cont.) Tangible query interfaces allow people to physically express and manipulate database queries. This system demonstrates ways in which tangible interfaces can manipulate larger aggregates of information. One of these query approaches has been evaluated in a user study, which has compared favorably with a best-practice graphical interface alternative. These projects are used to support the claim that physically constrained tokens can provide an effective approach for interacting with aggregates of digital information.by Brygg Anders Ullmer.Ph.D