Illuminating Clay: A tangible interface in landscape design

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Illuminating Clay A tangible interface in
landscape design

• Touch CAD models with your own hands!

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Tangible user interface (TUI)

• Definition
• An attempt to give physical form to digital
  information, making bits directly manipulable and
  perceptible by people. Tangible Interfaces will
  make bits accessible through augmented physical
  surfaces (e.g. walls, desktops, ceilings,
  windows), graspable objects (e.g. building
  blocks, models, instruments) and ambient media
  (e.g. light, sound, airflow, water-flow, kinetic
  sculpture) within physical environments.
• In this presentation

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• Why tangible interface in landscape analysis?
• Is it effective?
• Whats the benefit?
• Advantages or disadvantages?

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Typical interaction of landscape analysis
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Cooperation and conflicts

• Can you move the house closer to the river?
• Not everyone can read the complex CAD diagram
• Not a easy job to modify the diagram quickly
• No result can be show immediately

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Providing better collaboration

• Combined intuitive and quantitative Interface
• Intuitive understanding without special skills
• Getting more people without geography background
  involved into the landscape analysis (i.e. local
  Inhabitants)

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Indirect manipulation

• Changes of the physical shape
• Immediate feedback to the user
• The scan result which displayed on the screen
  (0.3s delay)
• Disparity between CAD model and current physical
  shape (1s? delay see the video, hue order)
• Instruments
• Suggestions about landscape after analysis (i.e.
  solar radiation, watering system and passage
  design)

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Authors review

• Creating and understanding the topographies with
  TUI are more efficient
• Intuitive understanding
• A real-time reflection between geometric changes
  and landscape system
• A set of algorithms
• 3-dimensional display on the3D model
• Potential accuracy issue withcalibration

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Evaluation sumary

• An alternative way of collaboration in landscape
  design
• No special skills required (familiarity)
• People with different background (ergonomics)
• Latency time could be intolerant
  (synthesizability)
• When user firstly build up physical model
  according to the color mapping
• No easy solution to physical shape
  undo(recoverability)
• Stability of the clay shape
• Is the metal mesh core strong enough to maintain
  the shape
• Lack of such discussion, but necessary

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Future work

• Construction of physical models could be improved
  both on accuracy and speed
• Faster and accurate scan technology
• Lower down the cost of scanning device
• Remote collaboration may get people involved more
  easily
• Replica of the physical model
• Communication latency time
• Lower down the cost ( 45,000 )

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• Questions?