Who is Hiroshi Ishii?
Hiroshi Ishii is Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is head of the Tangible Media Group (TMG) and co-director of the Things That Think (TTT) consortium. Ishii’s research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment. His group seeks to change the “painted bits” of GUIs to “tangible bits” by giving physical form to digital information. [1]
What is Tangible Media Group (TMG)?
The motivation for the TMG is that our ancestors developed in the past a range of specialized physical artifacts with different functionality, for instance to measure the passage of time, to predict the movement of planets or to compute. But many of these artifacts disappeared and were replaced by the most common of devices: the Personal Computer (PC). In consequence, the Human Computer Interaction is nowadays limited to the use of a screen (desk-mounted, head-mounted, hand-held, etc.), a mouse and a keyboard. The Tangible Media Group wants to reject this traditional way of HCI and wants to use real physical objects for representation and control of digital information instead. (Figure 1)
Figure 1
What are the conceptions related to “Tangible Bits”?
To achieve the goals of augmenting the real physical world by coupling digital information to everyday things, Hiroshi Ishii worked out three key concepts: “interactive surfaces”, “coupling bits and atoms” and “ambient media”. The concept “interactive surfaces” suggests a transformation of each surface (walls, ceilings, doors, desktops) into an active interface between physical and virtual world. The concept “coupling bits and atoms” stands for the seamless coupling of everyday objects (card, books, and toys) with digital information. The concept “ambient media” implies the use of sound, light, air flow, water movement for background interfaces at the periphery of human perception[2].
What are the Applications?
Tangible User Interfaces can be applied in many domains. Two of the most important domains are “information storage, retrieval and manipulation” and “information visualization”. Furthermore, there are a lot of other application domains for tangible user interfaces like “modeling and simulation”, “system management, configuration and control” etc.
The Tangible Media Group developed several research prototypes, for example metaDESK (Figure 2), transBOARD and ambientROOM (Figure 3)2.
The metaDESK explores the concepts “interactive surfaces” and “coupling bits and atoms”. In a tangible user interface, windows are represented by lenses. There exist two sorts of lenses, active and passive ones. Active lenses are arm-mounted flat-panel displays, passive lenses are optically transparent. In addition to that, there are some instruments, which can be used on the surface of the desk. All these objects are sensed by a set of optical, mechanical and electromagnetic field sensors
The motivation for ambientROOM is about brain’s ability of getting information through two communication channels. In day-to-day interaction people obtain information in two ways: for instance, when somebody has a talk in a seminar, the other persons in the seminar listen to him and focus on him. But besides this primary information they also get information from ambient sources, for example what the weather is outside. They don’t have to concentrate on the weather and look all the time out of the window. Ambient sources like air flow or light are perceived and processed through background channels by our brain and indicate, in this example, what the weather is. But if the light conditions suddenly change, we notice it.
From the user’s point of view, the transBOARD looks like an ordinary whiteboard. But it allows distributed users to view both real-time and recorded drawing processes over the internet. The active surface of the whiteboard serves as a one-way filter for absorbing information from the real world. To provide this functionality, the transBOARD supports the use of hyperCARDs. These cards are barcode-tagged paper cards and serve as containers of “digital strokes” 2.
Figure 2
Figure 3
[1] Hiroshi Ishii. [Internet]. : The Media Lab.; c2003 [cited . ]. Available from http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/
For more examples and comprehensive discussion of CBE/CSE formats, see http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/publications/citing_internet.cfm
[2] Topic: Tangible Media Group. [Internet]. : Christian Schmitz ; c2003 [cited . ]. Available from http://w5.cs.uni-sb.de/~butz/teaching/ie-ss03/papers/TangibleMediaGroup/TMG.htm
For more examples and comprehensive discussion of CBE/CSE formats, see http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/publications/citing_internet.cfm
