Handling it

We are handling real objects now in order to understand the movements. We may be able to translate this to our gesture interface later but we need to understand how to design meaningful gestures first.

When we start to analyze object manipulation we find that there are many different ways of interaction, we can push, pick up, drag etc.

While testing the handling of objects we started to talk about social interactions when we handle objects. Things like giving and taking from other people can be an interesting angle. While testing this we started to play tricks on each other and saw how this changed the way we received the objects, you can see me taking it from under after Lin just dropped it once.

While doing this prototyping we started to talk about hesitant actions and deciding not to do thing. We got back to the discussion we had earlier on, when Lin talked about hesitating to press play, and this time I understood her better. Just because the machine sees an interaction as a binary action, play or pause, it does not mean that the mover or observer sees the same. When you press play, your action starts earlier, the whole approach to the machine, reaching out and finally pressing play is part of the move.

This whole move is disregarded by machines today, they just listen for button presses and similar. We found this interesting and started to investigate the canceling of actions.