On stage: the reactable and other musical tangibles go real

This paper explores one of the application domains in which tangible and tabletop interfaces have currently shown more positive results, studying and unveiling the essential reasons that turn live music performance and tabletop interaction into promising and exiting fields of multi-disciplinary rese...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Author: Jordà Puig, Sergi
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2008
Country:España
Institution:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repository:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10230/41998
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/41998
http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/IJART.2008.022363
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Design
Interaction techniques
Interfaces
Musical instrument
Reactable
Real-time interaction
Tangible tabletop interfaces
Description
Summary:This paper explores one of the application domains in which tangible and tabletop interfaces have currently shown more positive results, studying and unveiling the essential reasons that turn live music performance and tabletop interaction into promising and exiting fields of multi-disciplinary research and experimentation. The paper is structured in three parts. The first one exposes the main reasons that turn live music performance into an ideal test-bed for tangible interaction and advanced human–computer interaction. Reciprocally, the second part studies why tabletop interfaces promise remarkable new musical instruments. The third part describes the main design issues that lead to the development of the reactable, a tabletop musical instrument that has been conceived based on many of the criteria exposed on the previous two parts.