Audio d-touch Seminar

Audio d-touch is a collection of applications for real-time musical composition and performance, with very special user interfaces.

The collection includes a drum machine and a sampling sequencer, both are controlled by spatially arranging physical objects on an interactive table surface. Each object represents a sound, and its position with respect to the surface is mapped to certain playback parameters. For example, the horizontal position of an object represents the timing of the sound. The system is extremely low cost and now it can be freely and fully downloaded from http://www.d-touch.org/audio. All is
needed to get audio d-touch to work is a standard computer (PC or Mac) with a webcam and a printer.

Audio d-touch is an example of a tangible user interface (TUI), a computer interface where graspable, tangible objects are used to represents and control digital information, similarly to how icons are used in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The extremely low-cost nature of the system makes it a convenient research tool for
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), in particular to study how people adopt TUIs in everyday environments, an area that is to date under investigated. In this talk I will present initial results from a remote observation of audio d-touch and I will discuss the project in the broader frame of HCI research. I hope this will serve as a
starting point for discussion about HCI research itself.