This line of thought started from the response prompt, I promise.

For the first reading response, I mentioned Swype typing available on touch screens. Seeing Fishkin’s categorization of traditional keyboards as distant (along the embodiment axis) and none (along the metaphor axis), I though that typing on a touch screen might change the embodiment level to full (the input device is the output device) or maybe near (if we consider the display part of the touchscreen to be different from where the keyboard appears).

But then I started to wonder if a touch screen is even a TUI according to their definition, my main point of uncertainty being the nature of the input event. Fishkin defines an input event as “a physical manipulation performed by a user with their hands on some ‘everyday physical object,’ such as tilting, shaking, squeezing, pushing, or, most often, moving.” Does moving a finger on a touch screen count as a physical manipulation if no object is moved around? Would writing with a stylus be considered more of an input event because, in that case, the user is moving an object? What about gesture-capture systems where there is no “everyday physical object” other than our own bodies? Maybe that’s the center of my question: do our own bodies count as “everyday physical objects” around which TUIs can develop (without a non-corporeal intermediary)?