Tangible and Haptic Interaction

William ChoiCS 376May 27, 2008

• A chapter from Where the Action Is (2004) by Paul Dourish

• History of Computing

• Rapid advances in price/performance, but...

• “the ways in which the computer fits into our environments and our lives” have changed little..

Getting in Touch: Background

Mainframes PC

Ubiquitous Computing

Tangible Computing

?

Definition of Tangible Computing?

Physical world Digital world

Ubicomp, VR, Tangible Computing• “Tangible interactions take the revolution of ubicomp a step further, unifying

the physical design of unipurpose machines with its computation.” - Jason Robinson

• “If humans are able to interact with physical objects that represent digital data, it allows us to interact more naturally with our surrounding world as well as making computing more ubiquitous.” - Michael Fischer

• “It did promote a certain vision ("getting in touch"), but it seemed to overlap quite a bit with our ubicomp, multimodal, and direct manipulation discussions.” - Marcia Lee

Review of Ubiquitous Computing

• The Digital Desk (Wellner 1992)

• How can one work with both paper and electronic documents more fluidly?

• Support for really direct manipulation

• The boundary between the electronic and physical worlds blurred

• The Reactive Room (Cooperstock et al. 1995)

• Using context to disambiguate action

• Computing moves outside the “box”

Artifacts from the Design Perspective

• Examples

• Marble Answering Machine (Bishop 1992)

• “Live Wire” (Natalie Jeremijenko)

• Feather, Scent, and Shaker (Strong and Gaver 1996)

• Principles

• Communicative role emphasized (“at-a-glance readability”) - contrast to ubicomp

• Physicality is fundamental to the design

• Computation is integrated into the artifacts more directly

Tangible Bits (Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab)

• Digital and physical media are not interactionally equivalent.

More examples...

Does Tangible Computing Sacrifice Generality?

• “I think that it's possible that for tangible computing to work, we will have to let go of the multi-functional notion of computers and embrace something closer to Negroponte's "information appliances" vision.” -Neil Patel

• “A major flaw of the ideas presented in the paper is that each of the modes of interaction is very specific to its task...This means that many individual systems have to be implemented for separate tasks. The alternative is the current model: use one system that works like a machine, and can therefore easily do all the things a machine can do.” -Robert Travis

• “The key differentiator is that single-purpose systems appear to lend themselves to alternate interaction modes, but multi-purpose systems don't.” -Ryan Park

• “One of the main reasons why the Reactive Room was so effective at invisibly supporting meetings and presentations was that it “knew” that the room’s purpose was to hold meetings and presentations. The problem with this type of behavior, however, is that it doesn’t seem very scalable; most places in the real world aren’t limited to such a narrow purpose.” - Antonio Ricciardi

Towards Tangible Computing

• Multiple points of interaction

• Action distributed across multiple devices

• Coordination of devices for the same action.

• Non-sequential interaction

• Interactions much more closely resemble “real life”

• Unpredictable and harder to enforce strict ordering

• Interaction suggested by physical properties

• Harness the physicality of the interface to suggest its usage

• Natural interaction supported by “sequential affordances”

Some Concerns...

• Privacy & Desirability of Ubiquitous artifacts

• Evaluating how Ubicomp/VR/tangible models compare in their effectiveness

• Unpredictability in contexts such as creative processes

• Tied down to the scale and limits of physical movement

• Dependent on cost and technology

Theory of Tangible Interaction

• “Why does tangible interaction work?”

• “Which features are important, which are merely convenient and which are simply wrong?”

• “How does tangible computing mediate between the environment and the activity that unfolds in it?”

Haptic Techniques for Media Control

• “Haptic Techniques for Media Control”, Scott S. Snibbe, Karon E. MacLean, Rob Shaw, Jayne Roderick, William L. Verplank, Mark Scheeff, UIST 2001: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 199-208.

• Generality vs Specificity

• With the migration of the media to the computer, our interactions with a generic mouse or keyboard have lost “distinctive physical sensations”

• Haptic metaphor for control

• Media <---> Virtual dynamic systems <---> User

Examples of Haptic Techniques

Haptic Clutch

Haptic Fisheye

Foreshadowing

Alphabet Browser

More haptic interfaces...

Take-away’s

• To a degree, a confirmation that dynamic system metaphors leverage intuitive physical metaphors across multiple media.

• Need for a clearer development of “haptic language”

• Effectiveness of texture over forces for annotation

• “We also believe that it is possible to completely encapsulate techniques such as the fisheye or clutch into a general-purpose haptic device such as a mouse.”