Embodied user interfaces for really direct manipulation

Reviewer: Susan Loretta Fowler

The premise of this paper, and the research it reports, is that we have been missing an obvious part of the computing experience—the container. As the authors say, “Instead of making the box disappear, we want to rediscover and fully recognize that computation is embodied in physical devices that exist as elements in the physical world” (p. 75). To make this point, the authors modified three commercially available handhelds: A Mutoh-12, an e-book device, was given pressure sensors with which users flipped between pages. A Palm Pilot received a movement sensor and pressure pads. Users rolled Rolodex-like cards forward and back by tilting the Palm Pilot, and started and stopped the action using the pressure sensors. A Casio Cassiopeia was given pressure sensors that recognized the writers handedness. If the writer was left-handed, text on the screen automatically shifted to the right so that the writer could annotate the text from the left. Each augmented device required a few adjustments in the lab before the researchers rolled them out to real users, but once the authors got them right, the users who tested the devices said they were “magical.” Referring to the Cassiopeia experiment, the authors say, “Since no explicit commands were employed, users seemed amazed that the device recognized handedness. They were unable to tell how this was accomplished without us explaining it. This suggests that passive manipulations can be powerful, and that they can greatly impact a users interaction experience” (p. 79). The moral of the story When you are trying to solve an interface problem, do not overlook the box it came in.