Pascal’s Literature Review
George W. Fitzmaurice, Hiroshi Ishii & William Buxton: Bricks: Laying the Foundations for Graspable User Interfaces, Proceedings of CHI 1995, May 7-11 2001, ACM Press
This paper introduces a new Tangible Interface Called “bricks”, presented in the form of graspable objects that can be manipulated to interact with electronic or virtual objects.
The authors underline some of the advantages of this kind of interface as the following:
- It encourages two handed interactions;
- shifts to more specialized, context sensitive input devices;
- allows for more parallel input specification by the user, thereby improving the expressiveness or the communication capacity with the computer;
- leverages off of our well developed, everyday skills
of prehensile behaviors for physical object
manipulations; - externalizes traditionally internal computer
representations; - facilitates interactions by making interface elements
more “direct” and more “manipulable” by using
physical artifacts; - takes advantage of our keen spatial reasoning
skills; - offers a space multiplex design with a one to one
mapping between control and controller; - and finally,
affords multi-person, collaborative use.
This allows all kinds of different interactions, but is different from the pin and play concept in the sense that the bricks can be moved around on a plane surface, as opposite to the fact that you have to pin down the UI elements of the pin and play interface. (link to the document)
Chen-Je Huang: Not Just Intuitive: Examining the Basic Manipulation of Tangible User Interfaces, CHI 2004 Late Breaking Results Paper
This paper reports an experiment that has been performed to evaluate the performances and usability of TUIs in comparisons to the more classical GUIs. The results are in favour of TUIs, which seems to be more efficient.
Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer: Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms, CHI97 proceedings
This paper presents the vision of its authors in regards with tangible interface, and how to merge the real world and the virtual world, hence the use of words “Tangible bits”. This can be used as a point of reflexion for the design of interfaces based on the pin and play system. (link to the document)
Orit Shaer, Nancy Leland, Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gamez, Robert J. K. Jacob: The TAC paradigm: specifying tangible user interfaces, Pers Ubiquit Comput (2004) 8: 359–369
As stated in the abstract, this paper introduces a paradigm for describing and specifying Tangible User Interfaces. The proposed TAC (Token and Constraints) gives some kind of framework to describe and conceptualise TUIs, and could be used to analyse and evaluate the actual pin and play interfaces that will be designed in the future. (link to the document)
Hayes Solos Raffle, Amanda J. Parkes and Hiroshi Ishii: Topobo: A Constructive Assembly System with Kinetic Memory: CHI 2004, April 24–29, 2004, Vienna, Austria.
This paper introduces a 3D constructive assembly system with the ability to record and playback physical motion. The evaluation conducted for this system in classrooms with children ages suggested that children develop affective relationships with their creations and that their experimentation with the system allows them to learn about movement and animal locomotion through comparisons of their creations to their own bodies. This can give us clues on how a tangible user interface can be used for educational purposes. (link to the document)
Bryg Ullmer and Hiroshi Ishii: Emerging Frameworks for Tangible User Interfaces, “Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millenium,” August 2001, pp. 579-601.
This paper presents in more details how the TUIs can be described and modelled, in complement with TAC paradigm presented earlier can be used to describe TUIs. This could be used in correlation with the Orit Shaer, Nancy Leland, Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gamez, Robert J. K. Jacob paper to model and reflect on the pin and play interface. (link to the document)