During one of the technical papers sessions at the recent SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer \/ Human Interfaces) conference, two papers stood out for me because they represented perfectly opposite philosophies.<\/p>\n
One paper looked for — and found — all the special cases where real world tools could be effectively mimicked by putting your fingers on a multitouch surface (eg: an iPad) as though you were using that tool. Some tools, like a tape measure, computer mouse, pen and eraser, can be mimicked very well on a tablet. Others, like scissors, cannot.<\/p>\n
The authors found seven real-world tools that could be mimicked beautifully in this way, and after their live demo they got a big spontaneous round of applause from the audience.<\/p>\n
But another paper took the opposite approach. The authors asked “what are the hand and finger gestures that are inherently powerful and expressive on a multitouch surface?” Essentially they game up with a grammar — a way of building an extremely large and extensible vocabulary of hand gestures that nobody had ever tried before.<\/p>\n
The power of the first approach is that it is contingent: It works because there are particular real world tools that happen to map into finger positions on a multitouch screen. The power of the second approach is that it is generative: It builds from the inherent richness of what a hand and fingers can express when interacting with a flat surface.<\/p>\n
The paper that relied on contingency was more of a crowd pleaser. But in the long run, my money is on the generative approach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During one of the technical papers sessions at the recent SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer \/ Human Interfaces) conference, two papers stood out for me because they represented perfectly opposite philosophies. One paper looked for — and found — all the special cases where real world tools could be effectively mimicked by putting your … Continue reading “Generative versus contingent”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14788"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14789,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14788\/revisions\/14789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}