Elevating Interactivity

Reactable is basically an electro musical instrument that was developed last year in Spain. It has made the rounds of a bunch of design shows in Europe, but I don’t know that it’s ever been in the US yet. It’s a very interesting and unique interactive interface.

First of all, the basic system is a round tabletop that is a multi-touch surface. Unlike most of the surface computing interfaces developed so far, however, the primary control mechanism is not fingertip (although it does that too.) Rather, the system is designed to recognize various “tangibles” that are placed onto its surface. These tangibles have little drawings on them. Some of them are cubes, with different drawings on each side. Although these drawings look fanciful, they are in fact completely functional because the system is programmed to recognize each symbol. In this way they function just like a barcode at the checkout counter.

Now the purpose of Reactable is to make music, so each of these tangibles represents some element of the electronic music, and once placed on the table its properties can be changed by manipulating it or combining it with other tangibles. At this point you should probably just watch this video. Since I’m not an electronic musician I can’t explain it nearly as well.

Under the covers Reactable is a great example of an interface that uses a projector and camera trained onto the same surface to create a surface that can be interacted with in innovative ways. We are starting to see a lot of creative uses of this technology. It’s a change from the usual tabletop interface that uses traditional touch screens embedded in a table, although sometimes that works well too. Reactable is rear-projected from below the tabletop surface, but we are also starting to see some interesting systems that front project from above. I’ll try to post on one of those soon.

One of the things I especially like about Reactable is that several people can play it at once creating interesting musical collaborations. The form factor of using rear projection facilitates this, because Reactable is round, giving it no specific orientation.