Interacting without Touching
Understanding the properties, challenges and social consequences of touchless body-based interactions
Through our bodily relationship and actions with objects, places and each other, we are able to express and create a rich variety of meaning and human value. Gestures, movement trajectories, spatial positioning, and proximity are all means through which we communicate, interpret and control or they are a means through which can participate in fun and engaging experiences, such as sports or games. With the emergence of evermore sophisticated image processing techniques and appropriate body sensing instrumentation, digital technologies are now able to detect and interpret movements and position. This allows us to use our bodies to interact in ever more sophisticated ways with digital world without props or direct touch with objects and traditional input devices. Proximity, orientation, gesture full body movement, and even the use of brain waves are all means by which we can interface with the digital world without touch. These new mechanisms open up opportunities for exploring new genres of experiences and applications in a variety of new contexts where touch based interactions alone may neither be possible, desirable or as engaging. How do these body sensing interaction and mechanisms change our bodily relationship, with objects, places and with each other? The important concerns for this theme are to understand the properties, challenges and social consequences of touchless body-based interactions relative to tangible prop-based interactions and how to design experiences with these mechanisms that achieve value and meaning for people in everyday contexts.
Key research questions:
- How do we perceive these and engage with these systems?
- What new genres of applications are afforded by touchless interactions?
- What are the appropriate contexts of use and value points for touch vs. touchless interaction mechanisms and how should they be combined?
- How are opportunities for touchless interaction made visible and interpretable to ourselves and others?
- How do we ensure intentionality in touchless interaction systems?
- How do we constrain and structure interaction constraints for movement based and body based interactions?
- What are the social and collaborative properties of body-based touchless interfaces?
- What are the appropriate ways to couple body based interactions with the digital world?
Projects:
- Touchless and full body interaction for gaming
- Brain-computer interfaces
- Touchless vs prop-based interaction
- Crowd-Computer Interaction
