Tangible Media projects
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People have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating physical environments. However, most of these skills are not employed by traditional GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces). The Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Hiroshi Ishii, seeks to build upon these skills by giving physical form to digital information, seamlessly coupling the dual worlds of bits and atoms. They call this the Tangible Bits vision of HCI (Human Computer Interaction).
Guided by the Tangible Bits vision, they have designed tangible user interfaces that employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information. One direction of research consists of foreground interactions with graspable objects and augmented surfaces, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. A second area of interest comprises background information displays which use "ambient media"—ambient light, sound, airflow, and water movement—to communicate digitally-mediated senses of activity and presence at the periphery of human awareness. Their goal is to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits," taking advantage of the richness of multimodal human senses and skills developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world.
In this talk, I will present videos of several TMG projects, discuss the musicBottles project in some depth, and answer questions about "tangible media".
