As Fishkin introduced the taxonomy of TUI, Dance Dance Revolution was a UI that came to mind. As input, players stomp their feet on pressure-sensitive mats to the rhythm of the surrounding music. As output, the computer calls out commentary and generates a color bar that visualizes your performance.

I personally have always found the embodiment a bit lacking, because dance is reduced to patterns of four directional arrows. In some recent versions, they have also added more affordances, such as remote controls that can be utilized to incorporate hand movements into choreography. The metaphor of DDR is one of a verb, the mat translates synchronized feet and hand motions into a graded dance.

I support the taxonomy. When applied to something like DDR, it creates a neat conceptual bin for the UI to fall into. This conceptual bin is demarcated by concepts such as “metaphor” and “nearby”. It’s impressive that he casts this wide net over just about every human-computer interaction (Urp and greeting cards being under one umbrella) and still manages to define a vocabulary for them all. Holmquist’s description of tokens, containers, and tools is also helpful, because he further refines what it means to be a TUI artifact: is the input generic, or is it more contextual? (DDR, I’ve determined, is a token.) I also appreciated how he clarified the distinction between phicons and tokens and containers.