Tangible Bubbles allows children to record their voice by speaking into a hallow container such as the balloon or accordion prototype. The design is light and manageable for small children so that it acts as a toy. The TangibleBubble that now encapsulates the child's recorded voice, replays the sounds and distorts it by changing pitch and speed according to intuitive manipulation like squeezing. Further, the "bubbles" of their recordings can be released onto a "window." There the encapsulated bubble messages can be dragged to "Grandma's Door." This action results in the voice recording being emailed to "Grandma!" Or, the window would be utilized as a two way communications system if the other user was "online."
This concept of making sound tangible and movable is similar to the case study in The TAC Paradigm: Specifying Tangible User Interface (Ryokai, Raffle, Brooks) on the Marble Answering Machine. The answering machine saved encoded voice mails onto marbles that were manipulated in two ways. The message marble would be placed in an indentation on a sound machine for playback and the other to call the person back by placing it in an indent in a phone. Both turn the intangible sound/voice into recordings that are physically represented by the balloon or accordion and marble, and both make the sound malleable.
Both examples follow the guidelines of a Token and Constraint structure (TAC). In the marble message example, its is clear that the marble is a Pyfo, it acts as the token that is constrained by the playback machine and the augmented phone. For Tangible Bubbles, the TAC element comes in two forms. First, the child's face is a trigger for the start of recording when they press their faces against the constraint, the opening of the containers. The second token comes as the bubbles that have to be directed to the specific mail recipients and only manipulated according to the physical constraints of the balloon or accordion.
Another element of TUI's is the input, sense, and output pattern. In A taxonomy for and analysis of tangible interfaces, Fishkin highlights the "Sketchpad" as an example. The ‘‘Sketchpad’’ is a small computer display that when shaken clears the display. Here the shaking movement is like our voice recording. They are both examples of input, generally a physically event caused by the user. The way the objects reacts is the sensing component and their reactions, erasing the screen and the sounds being distorted, are the output feedback.
The Tangible Bubble also clearly uses Fishkin's concept of the Metaphor. The whole idea of a TUI,taking a virtually represented concept or idea and physically embodying it into something realistically, needs the metaphor. It is what instills the intuitive understanding and links between the virtual and tangible. This example depends on the shape of how we visualized our words and sentences. Remember how in comic strips the words and speech of the characters are represented by bubbles? In this way the Tangible Bubble becomes like the bubbles emitting from the child's mouth that eventually are transported onto the whiteboard and sent off endearingly to a relative!
In summary, our sound bubble is our constraint that is "coupled," an attribute that the TAC paradigm points out, with the sound of the child's voice. This coupling is enabled by the metaphor, the intuitive understanding that the bubble represents the sound recording. Then, after our input has been sensed and understood and the sound has been recorded, the bubble is manipulated by the constraints provided by the embodied object; the accordion or balloon is compressed to increase or decrease the pitch and speed. Finally the exported result is the altered token, for example the new recording that is lower in pitch and slower.
That's my understanding so far of the Tangible Bubble and how it fits into TUI frameworks!
