Paper Reading #15: Madgets: actuating widgets on interactive tabletops

References

Malte Weiss, Florian Schwarz, Simon Jakubowski, and Jan Borchers.  "Madgets: actuating widgets on interactive tabletops". UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.  ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010.

 Author Bios

Malte Weiss is currently a PhD student at the Media Computing Group.  His research focuses on interactive surfaces and tangible user interfaces.

Florian Schwarz is currently an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.  He received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts.

Simon Jakubowski is currently a Research Scientist at AlphaFix. He was a research scientist at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. 

Jan Borchers is currently a professor at RWTH Aachen University.  He received a PhD in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology.

Summary 

• Hypothesis - The researchers hypothesized that they could create small, light-weight physical widgets to be used on top of an interactive touch display that could modify the position of the widget.
• Method - The goal of this paper was to make an interactive tabletop that was low cost and light-weight. The realized this by using magnetic widgets and an electromagnetic array below the screen. They utilize infrared reflectors and sensors to classify a given widget and get its location. By changing polarities and strengths of the magnets below the display they are able to move the Madgets along a calculated path.
• Results - The researchers were able to construct their prototypes as well as several other types of widgets. The widgets themselves to not take long to build, although registering new controls can take considerably longer (up to 2 hours). The developers are currently working on a method to make the process faster to allow for rapid prototyping.
• Content - The authors of this paper presented Madgets, a method to integrate physical objects with the virtual world. They also demonstrated that the system can do much more with the widgets than just move them physically; they can alter their properties and make them perform much more complicated tasks, such as ring a bell or act as a physical button. The paper offers a complete description of how the system works and why it is beneficial.

 Discussion

All in all, I rather enjoyed this concept. Although it wasn't a research paper per se, it did hold some interesting ideas. While reading it I toyed with the idea of playing chess with a system such as this. This could also be useful for representing a military battle, physically representing troop movements without moving pieces inaccurately by hand. It also made me think of the hologram game in the original Star Wars movie (4th), which looked a little like chess but with monsters. Not quite the same concept, as that deals with holograms, but it did remind me of it.