Tangible User Interface

It looks like the tangible user interface is reforming digital media into physical elements and events rather than flat touch displays, keyboards, mouse. The concept is not new. It goes back to early 1990s. It is an active research field and many companies are working. Some references indicates Microsoft, Apple, Oracle are among these companies along with the universities such as MIT, Berkley, Georgia Tech.

There are several demonstrations. You can see more from the following links:

Tangible_user_interface at Wikipedia

Tangible user interface at MIT Media Lab

For initial idea, you may watch the following video:

Tangible user interface is another milestone on the path of the convergence to bring digital media to be more accessible and utilizable. Some of us remember the old big computer centers, green screens, keyboards used to type commands in a command line interface.When graphics come to life, we started to see the graphical user interfaces, mouses.  It took some time to enable the graphical user interface from the boot of the computers. At the earlier stage, we were launching the graphical user interface by a command on command line. There were the first graphical word processors launched from command line interface. Not everyone could able to use a computer at those days.

Many business applications were developed on text screens, with limited number of symbols in ASCII set used to draw rectangular frames, to create bold-unrealistic shadows to give a pseudo 3-D feeling.

Then graphics became more advanced and commercialized into the small cheap computers, we saw the operating systems moved into full graphical user interfaces, and emulate the command line as a window in the graphical user interface. The usage of computers became much easier. No need to learn complicated command-line commands, their syntax. Everything was one click away.

When we saw the touch screens in bank ATM machines, most of us newer thought that it would be another milestone in user interface. The technology have been progressed in high speed, and now we see touch screens in every place. Our kids are trying to execute some icons on computer or TV screen by touching. When it doesn't work, asking why.It is so natural. They want to touch them like in physical world, pressing to a button.

Here we see, we are at the age of natural user interface, tangible user interface; another milestone. We want to access everything in digital media like everything in physical word. It seems clearly this is the natural path we have been coming a long time.