Siftables is a collaboration with David Merrill. This work aims to apply technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media.
When we overturn a container of nuts and bolts and sift through the resulting pile to find one of a particular size, or spread photographs out on a tabletop and sort them into piles, we use all of our fingers and both hands actively and efficiently. However, when we sort digital information or media such as digital photographs or emails, the experience does not usually leverage these abilities. We hope Siftables can bridge this gap without requiring any special infrastructure. As a general-purpose platform for human-computer interaction, they will open up new expressive possibilities in a variety of domains.
We presented the first version of this work at the Tangible and Embedded Interaction 2007 Conference.
There's a movie of an inert interaction prototype at right, some photos of a working first prototype above. An exploded detail of a siftable is below. A cartoon of an interaction is below and to the right. The second version is complete; media will be posted shortly.
D. Merrill, J. Kalanithi and P. Maes. Siftables: Towards Sensor Network User Interfaces. In the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI'07). February 15-17 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.
Above, siftables grouped together by hand are captured by the system as a digital group (indicated by their shared color). This digital grouping may consist of either putting all associated data in the same folder or applying the same tag to these data. Left, find an exploded view of a single siftable.