Tangible meets gestural: Comparing and blending post-WIMP interaction paradigms

More and more objects of our everyday environment are becoming smart and connected, offering us new interaction possibilities. Tangible interaction and gestural interaction are promising communication means with these objects in this post-WIMP interaction era. Although based on different principles, they both exploit our body awareness and our skills to provide a richer and more intuitive interaction. Occasionally, when user gestures involve physical artifacts, tangible interaction and gestural interaction can blend into a new paradigm, i.e., tangible gesture interaction [5]. This workshop fosters the comparison among these different interaction paradigms and offers a unique opportunity to discuss their analogies and differences, as well as the definitions, boundaries, strengths, application domains and perspectives of tangible gesture interaction. Participants from different backgrounds are invited

Interaction and Participation in Radio Plays: A Novel Approach to an Old Medium

Abstract. Radio plays have recently regained both popular interest and commercial success. Yet, listeners are not provided with either feedback channels or the ability to actively participate in this medium. The TAPE-Player concept described in the present paper extends the radio play medium by adding interactivity as well as participation to the production process. The user takes the roles of both actor and director, which includes verbal interpretation, recording, and editing the dialogues for the selected role(s) as the play’s script evolves. The creative freedom is supported by TAPE-Player’s underlying hypermedia architecture: audio clips are managed separately and combined dynamically to produce a personalised radio play. The applicability of the concept was corroborated in an empirical study. Specifically, the users welcomed the interaction via TAPE-Player’s easy-to-use interface, the creative freedom, and the substantial influence they had in producing radio plays in a personalised entertainment medium.

Grasping gestures: Gesturing with physical artifacts

Gestures play an important role in communication. They support the listener, who is trying to understand the speaker. However, they also support the speaker by facilitating the conceptualization and verbalization of messages and reducing cognitive load. Gestures thus play an important role in collaboration and also in problem-solving tasks. In human-computer interaction, gestures are also used to facilitate communication with digital applications, because their expressive nature can enable less constraining and more intuitive digital interactions than conventional user interfaces. Although gesture research in the social sciences typically considers empty-handed gestures, digital gesture interactions often make use of hand-held objects or touch surfaces to capture gestures that would be difficult to track in free space. In most cases, the physical objects used to make these gestures serve primarily as a means of sensing or input. In contrast, tangible interaction makes use of physical objects as embodiments of digital information. The physical objects in a tangible interface thus serve as representations as well as controls for the digital information they are associated with. Building on this concept, gesture interaction has the potential to make use of the physical properties of hand-held objects to enhance or change the functionality of the gestures made. In this paper, we look at the design opportunities that arise at the intersection of gesture and tangible interaction. We believe that gesturing while holding physical artifacts opens up a new interaction design space for collaborative digital applications that is largely unexplored. We provide a survey of gesture interaction work as it relates to tangible and touch interaction. Based on this survey, we define the design space of tangible gesture interaction as the use of physical devices for facilitating, supporting, enhancing, or tracking gestures people make for digital interaction purposes, and outline the design opportunities in this space. © 2011 Cambridge University Press

Framing tangible interaction frameworks

Tangible interaction is a growing area of humancomputer interaction research that has become popular in recent years. Yet designers and researchers are still trying to comprehend and clarify its nature, characteristics, and implications. One approach has been to create frameworks that help us look back at and categorize past tangible interaction systems, and look forward at the possibilities and opportunities for developing new systems. To date, a number of different frameworks have been proposed that each provide different perspectives on the tangible interaction design space, and which can guide designers of new systems in different ways. In this paper, we map the space of tangible interaction frameworks. We order existing frameworks by their general type, and by the facets of tangible interaction design they address. One of our main conclusions is that most frameworks focus predominantly on the conceptual design of tangible systems, whereas fewer frameworks abstract the knowledge gained from previous systems, and hardly any framework provides concrete steps or tools for building new tangible systems. In addition, the facets most represented in existing frameworks are those that address the interactions with or the physicality of the designed systems. Other facets, such as domain-specific technology and experience, are rare. This focus on design, interaction, and physicality is interesting, as the origins of the field are rooted in engineering methods and have only recently started to incorporate more design-inspired approaches. As such, we expected more frameworks to focus on technologies and to provide concrete building suggestions for new tangible interaction systems. © 2009 Copyright Cambridge University Press

Tangible play : research and design for tangible and tabletop games

This workshop addresses questions related to the areas of tangible interaction, game design and emerging technologies for tangible and tabletop games. We bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields related to these topics, such as HCI, computer science, interaction design and game design. We seek collaborative ways to move forward the field of tangible and tabletop games

Evaluating technology that makes physical games for children more engaging

Throwing is an important physical skill that lays the foundation for the ability to participate in many physical activities and sports experiences. We aim to support the development of physical skills through exertion game design; our focus here is on the design of an exertion based throwing game that aims to help children improve their ability to throw. We discuss the results of some initial play testing, and how these observations informed our game desig

Tangible play : research and design for tangible and tabletop games

This workshop addresses questions related to the areas of tangible interaction, game design and emerging technologies for tangible and tabletop games. We bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields related to these topics, such as HCI, computer science, interaction design and game design. We seek collaborative ways to move forward the field of tangible and tabletop games

How to facilitate physical skill development in exertion games

Throwing is an important physical skill that lays the foundation for the ability to participate in many physical activities and sports experiences. We aim to support the development of physical skills through exertion game design; our focus here is on the design of an exertion based throwing game that aims to help children improve their ability to throw. We discuss the results of some initial play testing, and how these observations can inform future game design to offer us insights into how technology can support the development of physical skills, important for physical healt