Tangible Bits

Technische Beschreibung

Beyond Graphical User Interfaces, Towards Tangible User Interfaces

The basic concept behind today‘s standard human computer interface, the GUI (Graphical User Interface) has been in existence for more than thirty years. The GUI works by visualizing information on the screen as pixels or „painted bits.” It began with the Xerox Star Workstation and, after some changes (some positive and some negative) and with the commercial success and dissemination of Microsoft Windows, the GUI has become the standard paradigm for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) today. We believe this paradigm is reaching the end of its evolutionary potential.
The GUI, tied down as it is to the screen, windows, mouse and keyboard, is utterly divorced from the way interaction takes place in the physical world we inhabit. It makes no use of the skills we have learned through direct tactile contact with and manipulation of objects in our material world. Neither does it allow us to monitor ambient stimuli, such as changes in the weather and the passage of time. Today the interface which links cyberspace with the real world is the standard three-part set: screen, keyboard, and mouse. The GUI is designed on the assumption that we will sit directly in front of it and that it will be able to monopolize our vision and our foreground attention. The objective of Tangible Bits is to provide concrete suggestions for how we might create a new interface paradigm that goes beyond the GUI paradigm.

Figure 1 (see_Fig. Tangible Bits) illustrates the concept of „Foreground and Background“ which serves as the foundation of the Tangible Bits design space. In this space the purpose is:
- to make bits directly manipulable in the foreground by combining information with graspable objects (as in the architectural models in “Urp”), and
- to be constantly aware of the information in the background (as in pinwheels) by infusing the environment with digital information using ambient media.

Caption: Human beings unconsciously take in and process a wide range of information from the periphery of their attention. Our research attempts to enable the smooth transition between this foreground and background information. This is achieved by combining graspable objects and ambient media. In this way, we attempt to refashion the very architectural spaces in which our bodies exist into interfaces between people and information.

(H. Ishii)