My 3rd Year Project; Project Brief

Project Title:

A Low-cost Tangible User Interface for Creating and Editing Flow Diagrams

Project Description:

This project aims to help when two or more people are working on a project and want to adjust a flow diagram. A standard computer user interface only allows one person to work on a diagram using a keyboard and mouse. The objective of this project is to make a low cost tangible user interface for flow diagrams so that multiple people can move blocks around and the diagram will be transferred to a computer.

The advantages of this idea are not only that it is usable by multiple people but also it is a very intuitive way of creating or editing as the physical blocks are graspable and therefore more instinctive to play with. This also means it could be helpful as an educational resource. Many people are better at working with things they can grab and physically move.¹

The Tangible User Interface (TUI) should be low cost so that students with their limited resources could use it. All that should be required is a computer and a webcam as well as a few simple printable resources.

Initially the aim is to produce this TUI for generalised flow diagrams so that people can move them around and develop there ideas as a group which will then be sent directly to the computer and reproduced there.

A secondary objective is to take this a step further and produce a specific program for Asynchronous State Machine diagrams which not only reproduces the flow diagram but then produces the System Verilog code that the diagram represents.

The project would be successful if a prototype TUI is made and tested. There are opportunities for further development should there be time such as releasing it online for download so that the quality of the user interface can be tested by a less restricted group of people and feedback could be gained.

There are projects that have precedent for this. The Microsoft Surface² is an interface that can be used by multiple people but it is both high in cost and it is not tangible in the conventional sense (It can detect footprints of objects but can’t do more than that). There is also precedent for tangible user interfaces. There has been some study particularly in how to develop music through the use of tangible user interfaces such as the d-touch³ set up or the reactable⁴.

¹ Fitzmaurice, G; Ishii, H.; Buxton, W. (2001) Bricks: Laying the Foundations for Graspable User Interfaces. Proceedings of CHI 1995 - http://tangible.media.mit.edu/content/papers/pdf/bricks-chi95.pdf

² http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

³ Costanza, E. Ubicomp to the Masses: A Large-scale Study of Two Tangible Interfaces for Download. - http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ec/tmp/audiodtouch.pdf & http://d-touch.org/

⁴ http://www.reactable.com/