Blog of Nikki Veldhuis

Last Tuesday our class had the first meeting with our tutor. Irene van Peer is now going to guide me to the end of my project. We all had to do a small presentation what our status was of each project. It was very interesting to see what everyone is doing. Unfortunately I was the last person who had to do the presentation and I had to rush a bit because we were out of time.

The main comment was that I have to figure out what area interests me the most. Embodied interaction within the living environment is a broad subject, of course. The goal I had set for myself was that I want to look at the possibilities of the embodied interaction and to pick a specific subject through prototyping and research. The plan was to do this the next few weeks. The problem with this is that I can get lost in the process, and don’t come up with a clear subject in the end. It is better to define myself as soon as possible.

During my presentation I gave some examples of projects that use physical interaction as input. With every video, I had some (mostly negative) comments about the interaction. Irene gave me the task to look at every video, and figure out which underlying subject drives me. So here it goes.

Canesta TV Gesture User Interface Demo

the video in short:
A television remote is an annoying necessarily to control your television, the video explains. Especially the on-screen interface is badly designed. Control through gestures is more intuitive. Simple movements with your hands makes you happy, jay! You can even use it while cooking! No need to put your dirty hands on the remote to change the channel.

My comments
Is moving your hands really better in this situation? Do you want to wave, swipe, push your hand when you are sitting on your lazy couch after you come home from work? It are simple physical movements for sure, but doesn’t it become tiring after an extensive period of time? I think buttons on a remote are better then doing physical movements, because it’s more responsive. Even if the remote is unintuitive. The problem lays in the design of the remote, not the interaction. Reminds me of an example of Nicolas Zurcher, whereby he looked at the buttons of the remote we really use:

Which parts of the remote do we actually use?

And how do you go through a large quantity of television stations with only gestures? How do you control other functions, like volume, source selection, the television guide and use of other complex things? How to achieve this without learning complex gestures or using another type of input?

Gestures are not the best way to interact with the system in this situation, I believe.

Embodied Playlist Access

The video in short
The concept is about using personal objects to control your music. Every object stands for a different type of music playlist. The point is to get access through different selections of data by moving personal objects.

My comments:
What interests me is quite simple; by using physical objects you get access to personalized data. It avoids fiddling with computers (i.e. keyboard and mice). It makes selecting you music preference personal and physical. The technical barrier (where tech savvy people are so used to) is gone. The question remains if personal objects are a good representation to get access to different types of music. I see some possibilities in other forms of data, however.

MusicShapes

The video
from the youtube description: “The objective of this project was to produce a concept and a prototype of a physical computing system that would leverage the principles of embodied interaction. We developed a system that combined a webcam and a series of geometric shapes, which would play a sound or music clip depending on which of the faces is facing up. The sounds played by an object were influenced by the surrounding objects and their positions.”

My comments
Not only the movements of the shapes are input, but also the distance between objects matter. The objects can ‘communicate’ with each other, manipulating the output by moving them. It is an very early prototype, but imagine the possibilities implementing this in everyday objects.

Scratch Mat

An very simple example in real life. What makes it awesome that it changes behavior. How many times do you wipe your feet when you enter a building? This mat makes wiping your feet a playful interaction. The output of the system is very simple, but still is effective in this situation.

Siftables

Irene gave this project as a suggestion to look at. Siftables are small interactive computers with a display, wireless communication and motion sensing. What is relevant for my project is that it uses real life gestures as input. For example, pouring paint from one siftable to another, and thus changing it’s color. I would murder someone to get some of these.

I will put my conclusions in the next post.