Photo credit: Webb Chappell


Hiroshi Ishii
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
USA

Tangible Bits: Designing the Seamless Interface between People, Bits, and Atoms

Where the sea meets the land, life has blossomed into a myriad of unique forms in the turbulence of water, sand, and wind. At another seashore between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenships in the physical and digital worlds. Windows to the digital world are confined to flat square ubiquitous screens filled with pixels, or "painted bits." Unfortunately, one can not feel and confirm the virtual existence of this digital information through one's body.

Tangible Bits, our vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), seeks to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly and collaboratively manipulable. The goal is to blur the boundary between our bodies and cyberspace and to turn the objects and architectural space into an collaborative interface.

In this talk, I will present a variety of tangible user interfaces the Tangible Media Group has designed and presented within the CHI, SIGGRAPH, UIST, CSCW, IDSA, ICSID, ICC, and Ars Electronica communities in the past several years.

For more information about Prof. Ishii and his research, please refer to:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ishii/ and http://tangible.media.mit.edu/ (external)