From Paul Dourish (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) http://www.dourish.com/embodied/embodied99.pdf
The author concerned with the conceptual foundations for a new model of Human-Computer-Interaction, explores in this article the following aspects:
Embodiment:
- “reflects both a physical presence in the world and a social embedding in a web of practices and purposes”
- “is a central feature of how we think about interaction”
Virtual reality and augmented reality systems:
- are been the most significant model of interaction in recent years
- Immersive Virtual Reality technologies create virtual worlds rendered in three dimensions, and then present them to the user as if they were real, complete
with stereoscopic displays and movement in the virtual space correlated with the user’s own movement.
- Mimicking the reality allows users to transfer familiar skills from the real world to the virtual.
Social computing:
- social computing arose in the 1980s
- attempts to capitalise upon social skills and aspects of the social setting in which systems are used
- HCI has been increasingly influenced not just by psychology, but also by sociology
- the activity of the user sitting at a computer is not defined simply by the patterns of their immediate interactions, but by web of surrounding relationships, practices and activities in which they are each embedded
Tangible computing:
- is a a phenomenon of the middle 1990s
- is exploring ways to exploit our physical and tactile skills
- we can better exploit our natural skills if we focus on interacting with the physical objects themselves, indeed of interacting with computers through physical objects (such as keyboards, mice and displays).
Both of these lines of development—social computing and tangible computing—are based on the same idea, that of embodiment.
What turns out to be important about tangible computing, is not the physical
nature of the objects through which we interact, but with what they represent and how we use them. At the same time, social computing emphasises how context lends meaning, and places a primary emphasis on action rather than abstract representation.
