Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms

Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer | CHI 1997

In a Nutshell 🥜

Ishii and Ullmer¹ introduce the influential vision of tangible user interfaces (TUIs), a coupling of bits (the digital) and atoms (the physical). The paper wishes to change GUI-based “painted bits” on rectangular screens into “tangible bits”, making the physical world the interface.

TUIs make the world the interface | Source: original paper

TUIs comprise of two key concepts:

1. Graspable media are “foreground bits” that users physically grasp and manipulate. These can be physical instantiations of GUI elements, such as lenses (physical windows) and phicons (physical icons).

   

   Physical instantiations of GUI elements in TUI | Source: original paper

2. Ambient media are “background bits” that utilize the peripheral attention of users, such as through sounds, light, airflow, and water movement. One example I love from the paper is using the sound of rain to indicate website hits. Heavy rain would indicate many visitors and light rain would indicate little visitors or a potential breakdown of the webserver.

Users actively engage with graspable media (foreground) and passively attend to ambient media (background) | Souce: original paper

The paper then discusses various research prototypes that they implemented to explore the idea of TUIs, including metaDESK, transBOARD, and ambientROOM.

Three research prototypes for exploring TUIs | Source: original paper

Some Thoughts 💭

• I think the concept of TUIs is really interesting and it almost seems right out of science fiction. Nonetheless, I wonder when and to what degree can TUIs be truly realized.

• Since TUIs rely on a mapping between physical objects and digital information, one first step towards TUIs is perhaps the realization of effective sensing systems to accurately acquire and interpret user input and give appropriate feedback.

1. Ishii, H., & Ullmer, B. (1997, March). Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 234-241).