Reading #5: Tangible Video Bubbles

Comments

Jessica Gonzales

Jimmy Ho

Reference

Tangible Video Bubbles

Kimiko Ryokai, Hayes Raffle, Hiroshi Horri, Yotam Mann

CHI 2010 - Atlanta

Summary

Between the ages of five and seven children enter a session of rapid increase in expressiveness. The authors propose a tangible video bubble, a device which supports capture and playback of video, as a creative medium for children which uses a friendly multimodal alternative to conventional GUI menu driven systems. The device contains a video camera and screen and is made of polyurethane foam with a 17 inch diameter. Pressing a button starts the capturing process, while pressing it again stops the process. The video can then be played back at various speeds and in various segments based on squeezing the bubble in different locations with different forces. The squeezes are determined by reading LED light levels from the camera image. Users can then transfer portions of their video to a communal screen, where the video can be played back and pictures can be drawn next to it. The system was evaluated with 18 children, ages 4 to 10 in pairs. Data collected was qualitative. Future work includes adding features to the shared screen and adding additional sensors to the bubble.

Discussion

While this project sounds like a ton of fun and is of great use for children, there are some aspects of the design that seem incomplete. On the positive side: an early design study was performed, 18 children were tested on the final design and the qualitative results seem encouraging. On the negative side: the shared screen was poorly described in the paper (how do the drawing activities fit in?), there weren’t any quantitative measures of data reported, and the technical info concerning the implementation was limited. That being said, I would love to play with one of these or at least see a video! The basic ideas of squeezing the toy at different positions and strengths to create new video was really interesting.... it makes me consider other possibilities! It would be great to see an ecosystem of these devices which had different abilities and could transfer between one another to perform more editing on their creations. The public screen space has so much potential too, think adding animation to the video, combining videos, etc. Overall this is a really enjoyable project, with a paper that could have done it much better justice by including a few more details.