Tag: Tangible

At first, you might think what you’re looking at is just a cool illuminated wall sculpture. Well it is that, but it’s actually more. It’s actually a weather forecaster with a tangible user interface.

It’s not only iOS devices that have a good grasp of touchscreen UIs, Microsoft isn’t bad at them either. However, there are only a few computers available that allow you to use gestures, and one of those is the Microsoft Surface.

From the same guy that cooked up the Proverbial Wallets comes a magical drawer that can transport messages to and from the Internet. John Kestner calls his creation the Tableau, and like the Proverbial Wallets, it adds a physical factor to digital processes.

I like high tech stuff that is easy to use and looks sort of like magic. Such is the case with the new Slurp device that turned up today. It’s a squeezy dropper that has some tech gear grafted onto it.

While I’ve been getting used to the touch-only display on my new iPad, I have to say that I really wish I could use both my fingers and a pen for doing things like taking free-form notes.

With all the buzz about 3D televisions coming out this year, the biggest problem with these displays is that they require special glasses to create the 3D illusion in your eyeballs. While this new device prototype doesn’t produce truly stereoscopic images, the effect it produces is the next best thing. Created by an engineering team at the University of British Columbia’s Human Communications Technology Lab, the pCubee is a handheld display comprised of 5 flat-panel LCD screens.

Ever thought about putting together your own “smart garments?” Well here’s a way to weave technology into your very own clothing without too much effort. Thanks to fabric technologist Hanna Perner-Wilson (aka Plusea), you can now purchase pre-made components which you can use to make interactive clothing pieces.

As I sit here in front of my HP Touchsmart PC, I can interact with many applications using my fingertips, but due to the size of the computer’s 25.5″ display, HP had to go with an optical sensor-based multitouch screen, which is limited to detecting only 2 fingers at a time.

Space Foosball is a modern-day spin on the old foosball table does away with those mechanical men and ping pong balls and replaces them with pixels and a physics engine. The cool thing about the virtual foosball players and ball is that they’re still controlled by the same sort of spinny axle controllers that traditional foosball machines use. In this case, however, software transforms all of the players movements into digital information which is used to control the virtual soccer players on screen.

You might play electronic music on synthesizers, drum machines, key-tars and guit-boards, but how many of you can claim you’ve jammed out with a set of cubes? AudioCubes are designed to be played in live performances, and let you control sounds by manipulating the position, angles and relationships between the palm-sized cubes. Not to be confused with gadget shop with the same name, Percussa’s AudioCubes are actually cubes.

Instead of using a traditional 2-dimensional display surface, Shade Pixel renders information using a deformable skin surface which provides a 3-dimensional texture to its output. Developed by researchers at the Design Media Lab at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), the device uses a dot-matrix array of solenoids attached to a flexible Spandex skin.

This music sequencer takes the same basic interface concept as the ball bearing sequencer I recently showed you, and makes it deliciously chewable. Instead of shiny metal spheres, this sequencer uses a bunch of colorful candy-coated gumballs to make a beat you can dance to.   Designed by Hannes Hesse, Andrew McDiarmid and Rosie Han – students at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, the Bubblegum Sequencer identifies the locations of strategically-placed gumballs to create rhythm tracks.

Here’s an interesting new tangible interface design for a music sequencer. Rather than using an array of buttons or a 2-dimensional control screen on a computer, this one generates rhythmic patterns using ball bearings. Sequences are composed by placing the metal orbs in a grid of receptor cups which represent the different rhythm tracks (kick, snare, hi-hat and cowbell) along the vertical axis, and beats along the horizontal.

Taking a page from science fiction films, Philips has been working on this new concept in electronic gaming which allows players to use physical game pieces to interact with video “board” games. At the heart of Philips’ Entertaible system is a 32-inch touch-sensitive LCD embedded into the top of a table.