Tangibility: highlighting physicality in interactive installations.

Abstract

Touch is our connection to our world and, as digital technologies develop, we must find ways to recontextualise touch within emerging digital spaces. This paper discusses the development of 'Tangibility', an installation combining tangible interaction, synaesthetic visualisations, and lens based animation techniques to encourage audiences to explore tactility. It introduces a system of sensual analysis and presents an interpretation of Laban's effort analysis as an evaluation tool for the effectiveness and design of tangible interfaces. It also explores how Kennedy's "Aesthetics of Sensation" can be adapted for synaesthetic visualisations and discusses how materiality within lens based animation techniques creates physicality within an image.