Journals Summary

Getting a Grip on Tangible Interaction: A Framework on Physical Space and Social Interaction (p437-hornecker) (2/5)

• A research on different frameworks for Tangible interaction (esp social).
• The increase of importance of TUIO objects with the HCI world.
• Relies on tangibility and full body interaction.
• Designing tangible interfaces requires not only designing the digital but also the physical.
• Computing moving beyond the desktop and ‘intelligent’ devices spreading into all areas of life and work.
• Applications previously not considered ‘interfaces’ are turning into such and computing is increasingly embedded in physical environments.
• Tangible interaction, the body itself becoming an input ‘device’
• 4 Themes:
• Tangible Manipulation
• Spatial Interaction
• Embodied Facilitation
• Expressive Representation
• Interesting but not that significant to our project.

A Tangible Interface for Organizing Information Using a Grid (p339-jacob) (2/5)

• A new tangible interface platform for manipulating discrete pieces of abstract information.
• Tests the effectiveness of the new interface by comparing it to both graphical and paper interfaces.
• The researches developed a new platform and tangible user interface for manipulating, organizing, and grouping pieces of information, which they believe to be especially suited to tasks involving discrete data, and collaborative group work. They called their new system, Senseboard.
• System focuses on manipulating a set of information items or nodes.
• By providing a tangible user interface for this task, they aim at blending some of the benefits of manual interaction with those of computer augmentation to achieve:
• a natural, free-form way to perform organizing and grouping;
• rapid, fluid, two-handed manipulation, including the ability to grab and move a handful of items at once (in contrast to mouse interaction);
• a platform that easily extends to collaboration (unlike the conventional mouse and keyboard interface).
• Senseboard consists of a vertical panel 1.1 m. wide x 0.8m. high, mounted like a portable whiteboard.
• Uses small rectangular magnetic plastic tags (pucks), which are placed on the whiteboard.
• Each tag contains an RFID tag which sends its location to the board.
• They tested this system using a (Dell Pentium II PC) driving a video projector, projecting information onto the board and tags. Their software, written in Java and running on Windows 98, received input from the board via a serial port and sent its output to the projector.

• Interesting but not significant to our project.

The reacTable: Exploring the Synergy between Live Music Performance and Tabletop Tangible Interfaces (p139-jorda) (4/5)

• Researched the creation of live music with tabletop tangible interfaces.
• Researches developed the reacTable, a musical instrument based on a tabletop interface.
• Gives the advantages of having tangible devices to control and produce live music rather than using for example a software program on a laptop.
• Having tangible devices to control and produce live music is very natural and similar to actually playing an instrument.

• The reacTable, has been designed for installations and casual users as well as for professionals in concert.
• In the reacTable several musicians can share the control of the instrument by caressing, rotating and moving physical artifacts on the luminous surface, constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.
• A simple set of rules automatically connects and disconnects these objects, according to their type and affinity and proximity with the other neighbors.

reacTIVision: A Computer-Vision Framework for Table-Based Tangible Interaction (p69-kaltenbrunner) (4/5)

• Provides an introductory overview to first-time users of the reacTIVision framework – an open-source cross-platform computer-vision framework primarily designed for the construction of table-based tangible user interfaces.
• The reacTIVision framework has been developed as the primary sensor component for the reacTable, a tangible electro-acoustic musical instrument. It uses specially designed visual markers (fiducial symbols) that can be attached to physical objects.
• These fiducial marker symbols allow hundreds of unique marker identities to be distinguished as well as supporting the precise calculation of marker position and angle of rotation on a 2D plane.

• The reacTIVision application acquires images from the camera, searches the video stream frame by frame for fiducial symbols and sends data about all identified symbols via a network socket to a listening application.
• Uses a redundant messaging structure (OSC) over UDP transport. These messages constantly transmit the presence, position and angle of all found symbols along with further derived parameters. On the client side these redundant messages are then decoded to generic add, update and remove events corresponding to the physical actions that have been applied to each tangible object.

• Would recommend reading this article to become more acquainted with how ReActivision works and the specifications required for example: interfacing with it in Processing; building the table and setting the camera.