Tangible User Interface

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A tangible user interface (TUI) is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment. The initial name was Graspable User Interface, which no longer is used.

One of the pioneers in tangible user interfaces is Hiroshi Ishii, a professor in the MIT Media Laboratory who heads the Tangible Media Group. His particular vision for tangible UIs, called Tangible Bits, is to give physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Tangible bits pursues seamless coupling between these two very different worlds of bits and atoms.

[edit] Characteristics of Tangible User Interfaces

1. Physical representations are computationally coupled to underlyingdigital information.
2. Physical representations embody mechanisms for interactive control.
3. Physical representations are perceptually coupled to actively mediated digital representations.
4. Physical state of tangibles embodies key aspects of the digital state of a system.

[edit] Examples

An example of a tangible UI is the Marble Answering Machine by Durrell Bishop (1992). A marble represents a single message left on the answering machine. Dropping a marble into a dish plays back the associated message or calls back the caller.

Another example is the Topobo system. The blocks in Topobo are like LEGO blocks which can be snapped together, but can also move by themselves using motorized components. A person can push, pull, and twist these blocks, and the blocks can memorize these movements and replay them.

Another implementation allows the user to sketch a picture on the system's table top with a real tangible pen. Using hand gestures, the user can clone the image and stretch it in the X and Y axes just as one would in a paint program. This system would integrate a video camera with a gesture recognition system.