M.A. Thesis, 94 pages
The last thirty years have presented us with technology that has had a profound impact onhow we produce, socialize with others, and consume culture. Today most of these actions arelinked to a computational setup which involves a screen representing our options in twodimensions and a hand-operated controller for manipulating the screen environment, ahardware setup that has not changed considerably the last 50 years. The dominant interfacefor personal computers—the graphical user interface—is highly ocularcentric, where onlyparts of the body apparatus (eyes and hands) are addressed in the interface directly. As anincreasing amount of information, life experience and human contact is channeled through it,the desktop computer system, becomes increasingly inadequate to fully represent theseactions. Any prosthesis added to or used in conjunction with the body and any part of thesensory apparatus neglected will define our interaction with information. Informationgathered by the somesthetic—the touch and proprioceptic senses—constitute a significantcomponent in the way we form hypotheses about what an object is, and how it can bemanipulated. By addressing the somesthetic senses in computer interfaces, we can achievericher and more intuitive interactive experiences.
This paper aims to identify the key components of a general purpose computationalenvironment that foreground multimodal interaction by 1) investigating the significantqualities of the somesthetic senses from a phenomenological and neurophysiological point ofview, 2) pointing to successful principles of human computer interaction (coupling), and toolsfor designing embodied interactions (physical metaphors, interface agents, affordances, andvisual and haptic feedback), 3) evaluating the components of current mobile phonetechnology, surface computing, responsive environments, and wearable computing.
(Source: Author's abstracts)