collecTable - tangible tabletop music organizer

Area: Product concept, Interaction & Interface design
Class: Interactive Media and Natural Interfaces Workshop
School: Visgraf, IMPA - Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada
Tutor: Luiz Velho
Partner: André Máximo
Year: 2008

collecTable is a music organizer application using tabletop tangible interfaces. By exploring the natural movements of a person trying to organize his media, i.e. music discs, video tapes, photographs, we present a system to investigate this interaction in a digital environment. Our implementation is based on the apple's iTunes(TM) software, and introduces a tool for mining media data through a multi-dimensional chart (we developed it further as the M-Cube). In this work we explore the relation between digital and physical worlds by connecting tangible objects, in the shape of mini-discs, with digital music albums. In addition, we use these objects to create different user profiles, allowing multiple users in the same iTable.

collecTable was produced during a 2 month workshop at Visgraf, the computer graphics laboratory at IMPA (National Institute of Maths) in Rio de Janeiro. The workshop's goal was to explore multitouch + computer vision technologies, that were a great novelty by that time. We focused on how people would deal with their own media collections, that became digital intangible media on a tangible tabletop interface. Also, we developed a visualization tool that allows smart interaction with user's personal database. That was my first time working with a computer scientist and this project inspired me to learn how to code. You can see a video of the presentation with working prototype below:

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