Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [16]
When you do, the map zooms in on the country you've chosen and offers a response to your selection. Holding the "news headlines" stone over Singapore, for example, calls up a live Web feed from the Straits Times, while holding "food" over Thailand takes you to recipes for Tom yum Kung and Masaman Curry. you can easily spend fifteen minutes happily swapping stones, watching the display smoothly glide in and out, and learning a little bit about Asia as you're doing so.
As the media table suggests, such tangible interfaces are ideal for places where conventional methods would be practically or aesthetically inappropriate, or where the audience might be intimidated by them or uncomfortable in using them. The production values of the lobby are decidedly high, with sumptuous fixtures that include a million-dollar staircase; the Asia Society had already decided that a drab, standard-issue Web kiosk simply wouldn't do. So part of Small Design's reasoning was aesthetic: it wanted to suggest some connection, however fleeting, to the famous garden of the Ryoan-ji temple in Kyoto. If the media table is not precisely Zenlike, it is at the very least a genuine pleasure to touch and use.
But Small also knew that the Asia Society's audience skewed elderly and wanted to provide visitors who might have been unfamiliar with pull-down menus a more intuitive way to access all of the information contained in a complex decision tree of options. Finally, with no moving parts, the media table stands up to the demands of a high-traffic setting far better than a standard keyboard and trackball would have.
Though the Asia Society media table is particularly well-executed in every aspect of its physical and interaction design, the presentation at its heart is still a fairly conventional Web site. More radical tangible interfaces present the possibility of entirely new relationships between atoms and bits.
Jun Rekimoto's innovative DataTiles project, developed at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL), provides the user with a vocabulary of interactions that can be combined in a wide variety of engaging ways—a hybrid language that blends physical cues with visual behaviors. Each DataTile, a transparent pane of acrylic about 10 centimeters on a side, is actually a modular interface element with an embedded RFID tag. Place it on the display and its behaviors change depending on what other tiles it has been associated with. Some are relatively straightforward applications: Weather, video, and Paint tiles are exactly what they sound like. Playing a Portal tile opens up a hole in space, a linkage to some person, place or object in the real world—a webcam image of a conference room, or the status of a remote printer. Some Portals come with an appealing twist: the Whiteboard module not only allows the user to inscribe their thoughts on a remote display board, but also captures what is written there.
Parameter tiles, meanwhile, constrain the behavior of others. The Time-Machine, for example, bears a representation of a scroll wheel; when it is placed next to a video tile, the video can be scrubbed backward and forward. Finally, inter-tile gestures, made with a stylus, allow media objects to be "sent" from one place or application to another.
From the kind of physical interaction behaviors we see in the media table and the DataTiles, it's only a short step to purely gestural ones, like the one so resonantly depicted in the opening moments of Steven Spielberg's 2002 Minority Report. Such gestural interfaces have been a continual area of interest in everyware, extending as they do the promise of interactions that are less self-conscious and more truly intuitive. Like physical interfaces, they allow the user to associate muscle memory with the execution of a given task; theoretically, anyway,