Comments on: Tangible interfaces: Collecting gestural and touch patterns

By: Graphisme & Interactivité » Appel aux designers d’interaction

Graphisme & Interactivité » Appel aux designers d’interaction — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:42:44 +0000

[…] Via Nicolas Nova. […]

By: InternetActu.net

InternetActu.net — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:36:59 +0000

Interfaces tangibles : à quoi nos gestes vont-ils servir ?…

Pour Dan Saffer, designer chez Adaptive Path, les designers d’interactions sont en passe de définir les principes fondateurs de nouveaux outils qui risquent d’être aussi importants que ceux définis dans les années 60 et 70 - et que nous…

By: Nicolas Nova

Nicolas Nova — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 18:42:25 +0000

Agreed! I fully agree with these statements, they are obvious limits. But this does not mean that they’re not relevant in some context (to be defined by user research)

By: joss

joss — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:17:29 +0000

I’d go along with Tiago questioning the future of gestural interface (where you don’t touch anything). I would see basicaly two “rules” of interaction design that would advocate against it :

- Gestural interfaces are not self-revealing : you don’t get to know what are your options and how to get to them. It’s like the difference between some command line and a visual interface.

- Gestural interfaces don’t provide feedback : with the large number degree of freedom you have, not having feedback would probably make it difficult to replicate precise gestures. To overcome this problem you have to define gestures that are “far away” (according to some gesture space metric) so that they cannot be misinterpreted, and thus reducing dramatically the expressiveness of these many degrees of freedom.

So it is probably more efficient to harness properly some space of limited expressiveness using a device that can provide both self-revealing and feedback capability.

By: Tiago M.

Tiago M. — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 14:34:12 +0000

I am not quite convinced with the Wii and iPhone example.

1) In both examples you *are* touching somenthing; you are touching the
input interface (the controller). A better example for not touching anything would have been, for instance, Kick Ass Kung-Fu, or any other application of computer vision.
2) In the iPhone case, input and output interfaces are overlaid (the multi-touch surface is overlaid to the screen), giving you the feeling you’re actually touching the virtual representations of data. As for the wiimote, you’re most of the time (but not all the time) using the a proxy for a real object (sword, gun, tennis racquet, kitchen knife) and gesturing with it.

So I really don’t get the sense of “not really touching anything except the controller” and “indirectly using a gesture”. To me it just illustrates the lack of a solid taxonomy for interaction.

And yes, let’s document gestures! And let’s document interface technologies and their application! We need taxonomies and design patterns for further use - and also to help poor students of Interface Design like me to be coherent when developing their thesis