Grasping
Animated by Claudius Lazzeroni's teaching method based on perception and by my wish to further explore the opportunities of sensual communication with computers I asked myself the following questions:
1) The sense of touch helps us in every day live to evaluate various objects such as the freshness of food. Is there a way of transforming such an application of the sense of touch to the computer?
2) The input devices on most standard computers today are restricted to a mouse and a keyboard. Is it possible to engender haptic experiences with these – from a tactile point of view – poor means? And if so, is there a practical application for this beyond beautiful design studies?
Interfaces
It turned out that it is actually sometimes possible to engender illusions of sensations with the givens means. Very often it is sufficient to combine images and sounds with the appropriately defined behavior of the mouse pointer or the "objects". The next challenge was to apply the obtained ideas to something "useful", in my case, to interface design.
Working on these studies I discovered the purpose or usefulness of studies that might appear odd or playful at first sight. Nevertheless it seems very important to me not to lose sight of some kind of an anchor, for instance a topic (here: sense of touch). Otherwise you run the risk of losing yourself in self-centered gimmicks or bits and pieces.
Images
