Tangible User Interface - A new approach on how to interact with computers

A tangible user interface is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment

Wikipedia definition

Tangible User Interface (TUI) is something I have recently rediscovered. Some time ago, I read something about it, and now, working on topics related to augmented reality, I have found out that this field is growing up very quickly with a lot of solutions and people working on it.

The idea is quite simple: use physical objects (sometimes even tools we use every day) in order to interact and work with computers. This concept means that using technologies like computer vision, tracking devices, touch screens etc. the system is able to know how the user is manipulating a collection of physical objects, and then it is able to translate these actions into events in the computer interface.

There's a basic paper you should read in order to understand this concept. The author is one of the TUI parents (Hiroshi Ishii). The title is Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms. You can get it in pdf here. Please, read it.

Professor Hiroshi Ishii is in fact, the leader of one of the most important research groups working on that, the tangible media group at MIT. If you want to see how a group of researchers can combine work and fun, research and pleasure, don't lose the chance to see the projects they have developed and they are working on ... and there are some very amazing videos. In fact, I put one of them in one of my first posts here.

Although it is clear that TUI has a great future, there's a lot to do in order to see real applications. The key is to be able to find something clearly easier to do with a TUI than with any other approach.

As usual, I like to look for some videos about the topic. Again, I invite you to see the videos at the tangible media group.

Although Prof. Hiroshi with his paper began this new field, in the following video, you can see that in 1990 people from Xerox was working on the concept:



An from the MIT, the SenseTable: