Sixth Sense & Touchable Holography

There have been many exciting developments in the field of HCI recently, with Augmented Reality, Experimental Sensory Experiences and numerous other emerging technologies making the headlines. Over the past year two in particuliar have stood out for me personally.

At TED this year Dr Pattie Maes a professor at MIT with the Fluid Interfaces Group gave a mind-blowing demo under the moniker of SixthSense which featured a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data.

Another technology I happened upon recently was featured in this years Siggraph, this demonstration is called Touchable Holography. It involves mid-air displays, holographics and actual tactile feedback. Normally we can “see” holographic images as if they are really floating in front of us, however we cannot “touch” them, because they are nothing but light. To address this problem Takayuki Hoshi and Masafumi Takahashi of The University of Tokyo have ingeniously combined holographics with actual tactile feedback.

This project adds tactile feedback to the hovering image in 3D free space. Tactile sensation requires contact with objects, but including a stimulator in the work space dilutes the appearance of holographic images. The Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display solves this problem by producing tactile sensation on a user’s hand without any direct contact and without diluting the quality of the holographic projection.

The potential applications of both of these technologies is huge and I watch for further exciting developments with great interest.


Filed under Interaction Design User Experience User Interface Design
Tagged with
On Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 10:19 pm Comments Off


The Way Things Go

RFID and NFC will both undoubtedly play a huge role in the field of Interaction Design in the coming years. The Institute of Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway have been carrying out some very interesting research in the field and have in turn come up with some very innovative applications utilising these Near Field Communications technologies. Their Touch initiative is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication, a technology that in short enables connections between mobile phones and physical things.

For their Nearness project they put together a nice short video in collaboration with BERG which illustrates some of the potential applications of these technologies.

Whilst watching the clip I was immediately reminded of the mind-blowing Honda Accord Cog Commercial which was made a number of years ago. You can watch the advert below.

The Touch group have obligingly acknowledged their influences and also included a mention of the art movie filmed by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss called ‘Der Lauf der Dinge’ or ‘The Way Things Go’. For their film they built a enormous, precarious structure 100 feet long out of common items. Using fire, water, gravity, and chemistry they created a mind-blowing chain reaction of physical and chemical interactions and precisely crafted chaos.

As a child I was fascinated by dominos and can recall watching with amazement those videos in which thousands of carefully placed pieces of plastic ran meandering paths on massive high-school gym floors. There is something hugely captivating about watching a chain of self-triggering events, and all of these movies use this technique to great effect.

From the world of art to the business of advertising and eventually arriving in the field of interaction design, the ‘visual chain of events’ device has been used to great effect. Lets see where it turns up next.


Filed under Interaction Design Miscellaneous User Experience
Tagged with
On Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 8:37 pm Comments Off