In this talk, David Merrill gives us an overview of his research on a number of novel platforms for accessing and manipulating digital content. These systems use expressive gesture and visual attention as inputs, explore multi-user interaction, and leverage our understanding of physical materials. I will focus on my most ambitious project and Ph.D. topic, Siftables, a tangible interaction platform that gives physical embodiment to information and digital media items. The system utilizes sensing, graphical display, embedded computation and wireless communication to free interactions with digital content from the desktop environment. Siftables points the way toward a new generation of interactive tools that bend to our needs, rather than bending us to meet their limitations.

Building sophisticated educational tools out of cheap parts, Johnny Lee demos his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer [...]

Autodesk announced that Autodesk SketchBook Mobile, a new professional-grade paint and drawing app that offers a full set of sketching tools in a streamlined and intuitive user interface designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch, is available on Apple’s App Store [...]

In this presentation, Camille Moussette explores the opportunities and challenges related to developing new multimodal interfaces specifically based on the touch sense. It will present various methods, techniques, tools and processes that interaction designers can use to assess, sketch, create and evaluate dynamic haptic and multimodal interfaces [...]

Utilizing the theory of electrostatics, a group of 5 electrical and computer engineering students from Northeastern University in Boston have designed a low-cost human-computer interface device that has the ability to track the position of a user’s hand in three dimensions. Physical contact is not required and the user does not need to hold a controller or attach markers to their body. To control the device, the user simply waves their hand above it in the air [...]

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin demos the AlloSphere, an entirely new way to see and interpret scientific data, in full color and surround sound inside a massive metal sphere. Dive into the brain, feel electron spin, hear the music of the elements [...]

The project of Designer Frantz Lasorne combines the joys of virtual reality, and tangible toys. Using Augmented Reality Tangible User Interface via head-mounted glasses, and old toys, a new environment is created that allows childs to play new games.

Imagine overturning a container of nuts and bolts, then looking through the resulting pile for a particular item. Or spreading photographs out on a tabletop and then beginning to sort them into piles. During these activities we interact with large numbers of small objects at the same time, and they utilize all of our fingers and both hands together. MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands…

How do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design desktop and web applications, what do you need to know to design for interactive gestures? This introduction to designing gestural interfaces will cover the basics: usability and ergonomics; a brief history of the technology; some elemental patterns of use; prototyping and documenting; and how to communicate that a gestural interface is present to users [...]

How would you like to control the visualization of designs with a strong tactile sense? This video demonstrates a new prototype by Autodesk for a “Tangible View Cube”. The cube is a small wireless device with built-in accelerometers and magnetometers to allow absolute coordinates of the cube to be passed to an application. Brian Pene and Eddy Kuo connected Matt Jezyk and Lira Nikolovska’s tangible cube to Autodesk Design Review to correlate and control 3D navigation, similar to how the View Cube works in the software [...]