Cool New Interfaces: From GUI to TUI to VR

Tangible computing blends physical world with virtual world by using real graspable things to manipulate digital media. Over centuries people have developed unique manipulation and interaction skills which can be exploited in the world of tangible computing. Tangible computer interface (TUI) embodies far more humanly natural manipulation skills than employed in typical graphical user interfaces (GUI). But the question remains: “Is TUI a subset of GUI?”

Tangible computing distinguishes from other HCI research areas like ubiquitous computing by not trying to integrate computing into everything and making it appear everywhere – often times without a physical presence – but integrating data into physical objects and using them to manipulate with digital medium. There are some overlaps, but tangible computing doesn’t always have to be ubicomp.

When I was given a task of finding papers about “Cool New Interfaces”, I immediately thought about cool interfaces from movies like Iron Man, Zero Theorem and Ender’s Game. I started researching similar technologies and then found Microsoft’s Hololens which is the first fully untethered, holographic computer, enabling high-definition holograms to integrate with your world [http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us]. It is presented and seen as a virtual reality (VR) interface, but I would make a bold statement and agree with the author of the paper that I chose [http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/316700], that it is in fact a new version of TUI. Hololens promises to present us with virtual objects which actually seem like physical ones – so we could use and manipulate them as we do with practical real life objects.

Second paper I identified for the fictional conference is about Physical Telepresence [ doi http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2642918.2647377] This technology is the next step for shared workspaces by capturing and remotely rendering people or objects in order to manipulate with physical things from distance. I can see a whole range of use cases for this tangible technology in different disciplines.

The third paper I chose talks about a TUI interface technology called ZeroN [doi http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2047196.2047239]. ZeroN is a physical anti-gravity interaction element that levitates and can be manipulated by people or computer in a 3-D space. It’s a good example of mixing physical world with the digital one and liberating objects from constraints of space and time.