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ABSTRACT

A compelling and provocative vision of the future was presented in Pierre Wellner's video and article on the Digital Desk [8, 9]. Physical office tools such as pens, erasers, books, and paper were seamlessly integrated (or at least almost seamlessly!) with computational augmentation and virtual tools, using projection and image processing. His work, and now our most recent efforts (reported in this paper and [1, 3, 5]), are directed at more seamlessly bridging the gulf between physical and virtual worlds; an area which we believe represents a key future path for the design of user interfaces. A goal of this work is to seamlessly blend the affordances and strengths of physically manipulatable objects with virtual environments or artifacts, thereby leveraging the particular strengths of each.The goal of this video is to visually present scenarios of a number of working physical prototypes we have designed and built which computationally augment everyday objects to support casual interaction using natural manipulations. Unlike previous work [2, 4, 8, 9], we have tried to build invisible interfaces that have little reliance on specialized single-user environments and/or display projection, or custom-designed objects. To this end, we start with everyday objects and embed computation in them in the ubiquitous computing tradition founded at PARC [6, 7]. We have combined four technologies (RFID identifier tags and readers, RF networking, infrared beacons, and portable computing) in a seamless and tightly integrated way. This combination has not been discussed in the literature and is only now being experimented with in research labs working on user interface design.

REFERENCES

• 1: Kenneth P. Fishkin , Thomas P. Moran , Beverly L. Harrison, Embodied User Interfaces: Towards Invisible User Interfaces, Proceedings of the IFIP TC2/TC13 WG2.7/WG13.4 Seventh Working Conference on Engineering for Human-Computer Interaction, p.1-18, September 14-18, 1998
• 2: George W. Fitzmaurice , Hiroshi Ishii , William A. S. Buxton, Bricks: laying the foundations for graspable user interfaces, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.442-449, May 07-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado, United States [doi>10.1145/223904.223964]
• 3: Beverly L. Harrison , Kenneth P. Fishkin , Anuj Gujar , Carlos Mochon , Roy Want, Squeeze me, hold me, tilt me! An exploration of manipulative user interfaces, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.17-24, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/274644.274647]
• 4: Hiroshi Ishii , Brygg Ullmer, Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.234-241, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258715]
• 5: Roy Want , Kenneth P. Fishkin , Anuj Gujar , Beverly L. Harrison, Bridging physical and virtual worlds with electronic tags, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.370-377, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.303111]
• 6: Want R., Schilit, B. N., Adams, N. I., Gold, R., Petersen, K., Goldberg, D., Ellis, J. R., and Weiser, M. An Overview of the ParcTab Ubiquitous Computing Experiment. IEEE Personal Communications, December 1995, pp. 28-43.
• 7: Weiser, M. The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific America,265 (3), 1991, pp. 94-104.
• 8: Wellner, P. Tactile Manipulation on the DigitalDesk. Video in CHI'92 Video Program, ACM SIGGRAPH Video Review 79.
• 9: Pierre Wellner, Interacting with paper on the DigitalDesk, Communications of the ACM, v.36 n.7, p.87-96, July 1993 [doi>10.1145/159544.159630]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
RFID tag, augmented reality, phicon, physical UI, tangible interface, ubiquitous computing