TUI Taxonomy

I wanted to see where Hiroshi Ishii’s pin-based shape display used for telepresence and other projects would fall on Fishkin’s taxonomy. Is it a full metaphor, where it is just an object to be interacted with, or is it only a verb metaphor when moving hands in one location moves them in another location? Is that distant? The effects are both local and far away. It seems to cross boundaries and be hard to define in the taxonomy.

For most other tangible user interfaces, Fishkin’s taxonomy was a great way to consider a spectrum of different interfaces that are called TUI’s. I appreciated the discussion about the proper amount of metaphor, and it helped me to consider how metaphor is helpful for learning, but strong metaphor can limit how an interface will be used.

With an interest in calm computing, I would like to see a similar taxonomy made that considers how much information is obtained without conscious effort. Many TUI’s seek to let the hands feel and guide an interface without the user explicitly thinking about how they feel, which is similar to the background attention given to calm computing.

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