What Björk’s done for us(tangible interfaces on the cheap)

Andrew WalkingshawUnilever Centre for Molecular Science InformaticsUniversity of Cambridge

http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/walkingshaw/http://www.lexical.org.uk/

But:

(relatively) pricyclosed platformactually not tangible

Musical interfaces are a hard UI problem

(So is visualization.)

They’ve got a lot in common:

need to experiment,flow and intuitiveness...

so: speed matters!

Processing

• “an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.”

• http://processing.org/

• (Based on Java.)

• By the way, that book’s really, really good.

“Visualizing Data” by Ben Fry: cover © O’Reilly Media

Crystallography 2000-2007The world of...

Crystallography 2000-2007The world of...

I saw this on Roo Reynolds’ blog:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/Rooreynolds/videos/9/

(He’s at http://rooreynolds.com/).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7QE5tHFwTg&feature=related

(Björk’s stage-show.)

So, then:

“... a collaborative electronic music instrument with a

tabletop tangible multi-touch interface.”

How does it work?

“reacTIVision is an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework... designed as a toolkit for the rapid development of table-based tangible user interfaces (TUI) and multi-touch interactive surfaces.”

Oh, hello there.

(http://reactable.iua.upf.edu/?software)

Fiducial markers

So you can make a tangible user interface, which lets you search Pubchem for molecules, for the cost of a webcam.

(And some printing, I guess.)

That’s a result!

More info:

http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/

http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/walkingshaw/?p=48 (source code etc.)

http://slideshare.net/covert/

Photo credits

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brainslide/3776689/http://www.flickr.com/photos/espressoroast/777123038/http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielwilliams/539568298/http://reactable.iua.upf.edu/pics/reactivision02.pnghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/lucamascaro/523822075/http://www.flickr.com/photos/edans/1526393678/http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/2086641/http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/448413335/http://www.flickr.com/photos/41894183508@N01/241682/http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaex0r414/236941395/