Paper Reading #5: Tangible Video Bubbles

Comments:

Jessica Gonzales

Zach Henkel

Reference Information:

Title: Tangible Video Bubbles

Authors: K. Ryokai, H. Raffle, H. Horii, Y. Mann.

Presentation: (Conference Paper) CHI 2010, April 10-15, 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Summary: 

According to the authors of this article, kids between five and seven years old are eager to develop more than one skill, and are not willing to do it by isolating each one of them to different times. Kids like to play, and then sing, and then dance, and then draw! Thus, they need to interact with tools that allow them to develop more than one of these skills at a time.

The authors affirm that conventional GUI interfaces do not allow kids to express their multi-modal desires. Thus, their goal was to "design, implement, and evaluate a new generation of kinesthetic multimedia tools..."that supports the kids' multi-modal creations. 

They developed the Tangible Video Bubbles. 
It is a flexible 17 inch in diameter vessel that has input and output capabilities. Children can record and playback videos, as well as incorporating the recordings into drawings. All the capabilities the Video Bubble has are controlled by squeezing the bubble at different speeds and until different depths.

Basically, their play space consisted of two things, a tangible video bubble, and an "interactive canvas" where they could "spill out" the video bubbles and 
they could draw on it. 

The tangible video bubble is "large, soft, and huggable," which has a video camera and a screen on its inside for recording and playback their videos. The authors describe the different capabilities of the bubble and the different ways to squeeze the bubble to obtain the results. 

After recording their videos, the kids can place the bubble in a platform near the monitor, and squeeze a digital bubble out of the the video bubble into the monitor. Then, by touching the bubble in the monitor they can take the video of the monitor, and play with it. They can also draw in the monitor, just like they would on paper. 

The developers tested the tangible video bubble with children from ages 4-8. They just allowed them to play with it for as long as they wanted. They were able to observe a difference in the uses and complexity works that the older kids would created, compared with the smaller kids. However, they affirm, that the older kids were as interested and engaged as the smaller kids.

The authors also discussed related works and the future developments for the tangible video bubble, which includes a feature where kids can "combine" bubbles in the canvas, since when the screen is filled up with bubbles, there is no other way to make more room for new bubbles than to delete old ones. Also, they want to incorporate sensors into the physical bubble to obtain new capabilities with rotation and acceleration.

Discussion: 
This was such an interesting article, for such a creative development that I wanted to add as much as I could into the summary, and put as many pictures as possible so that everyone can picture the idea of the tangible video bubbles. As I said, I think this was such an interesting creation, there is so much interaction and physical concepts converted into digital items, that I am sure it helps develop the kids imagination and interaction with technology, as well as their motor skills. 

I really hope that researchers continue working on this project, I think it could become marketable and thus profitable. I mean, it is not as inexpensive as the Audio d-touch tangible interface I discussed in my previous reading, but it is not as expensive as people would not be able to afford it. I think I would definitively buy one for my kids...