How will we interact with displays that come in any shape imaginable? What new interaction principles and visual designs become possible when curved computers are a reality?

 

tion Amanda Parkes, Ivan Poupyrev, and Hiroshi Ishii examine kinetic interaction design as an area of research in OUI. In a sidebar, artist Sachiko Kodama gives her thoughts on the use of physical transformability in interactive art forms. Finally, architects Kas Oosterhuis and Nimish Biloria outline their vision of a future in which entire buildings and cities are made out of networks of actuated, interactive, organic computers.

 

ORGANIC USER INTERFACES

These three general directions together comprise what we refer to in this section as Organic User Interfaces: User interfaces with non-planar displays that may actively or passively change shape via analog physical inputs. We chose the term “organic” not only because of the technologies that underpin some of the most important developments in this area, that is, organic electronics, but also because of the inspiration provided by millions of organic shapes that we can observe in nature, forms of amazing variety, forms that are often transformable and flexible, naturally adaptable and evolvable, while extremely resilient and reliable at the same time. We see the future of computing flourishing with thousands of shapes of computing devices that will be as scalable, flexible, and transformable as organic life itself.

We should note that the OUI vision is strongly influenced by highly related areas of user interface research, most notably Ubiquitous and Context-aware Computing, Augmented Reality, Tangible User Interfaces, and Multi-touch Input. Hiroshi Ishii opens this section by exploring some of those historical trends that led to OUIs. Naturally, OUIs incorporate some of the most important concepts that have emerged in the previous decade of HCI, in particular embodied interaction, haptic, robotic, and physical interfaces, computer vision, the merging of digital and physical environments, and others. At the same time, OUIs extend and develop those concepts by

placing them in a framework where our environment is not only embedded with billions of tiny networked computers, but where that environment is the interface, physically and virtually reactive, malleable, and adaptable to the needs of the user.

There has always been a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship between advances in basic computing technologies and HCI research. New technologies inspire new interface paradigms, while new interfaces utilizing these emerging technologies encourage their continued refinement by revealing aspects most useful in their application. We hope the ideas and projects presented in this special section encourage a dialogue on organic design that inspires designers and HCI researchers to invent that future reality in which these exciting technologies will benefit people in their natural ecologies. And we hope these stories inspire physicists and engineers alike to continue inventing and refining the very basic technologies so critical to realizing the future of computing. ^c

REFERENCES

1. Goldstein, S., et al. Programmable matter. IEEE Computer 38 (2005); 99– 101.

2. Johnson, J., et al. The Xerox Star: A retrospective. IEEE Computer 22, (1989), 11– 29.

3.Kay, A. On Dynabook; www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archiv- es/Kay/ 01_Dynabook.html

4. Polymer Vision. Readius: eReading Comfort in a Mobile Phone, 2007. 5. Poupyrev, I., et al. D20: Interaction with multifaceted display devices.

Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI’06. (Montreal, 2006), 1241–1246.

6. Vardalas, J. From DATAR to the FP-6000 computer: Technological change in a Canadian industrial context. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 16, 2 (1994).

 

ROEL VERTEGAAL ( [e-mail]) is an associate professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, where he directs the Human Media Laboratory. IVAN POUPYREV ( [e-mail]) is a member of the Interaction Laboratory at Sony Computer Science Labs, Inc. in Tokyo, Japan.