Touching Newton is
a concept for a game on a round multi-touch table particularly
designed for elementary school children.
multi-touch, serious game, children,
physics, physical computing,
Marek Plichta , Michael
Nischt
Dr. Gesche
Joost , Dr.
Michael Rohs
Idea and Conception, Building Hardware Setup, Interaction
Design
Self-manufactured Multi-touch table, Processing, Java, C++
2006 / 2007
Keywords:
Team:
Supervisors:
Responsible:
Technology:
Year:
For a research project I was commissioned
by the Deutsche
Telekom Laboratories to build a multi-touch table prototype
and develop software concepts on it.
While most multi-touch research projects back
than concentrated on developing tools for adults we concentrated
on the special needs of children in the area of multi-toch interaction.
We designed a game which tries to concentrate on the strong benefits
of face-to-face collaborative learning. It is inspired by Crazy
Machines a puzzle game about mechanical
chain reactions that we adapted to our setup. With their fingers
the children can move around virtual objects on the screen and manipulate
them with simple gestures. Some smaller tasks can be solved individually
while other tasks demand cooperation among the children. For example
one child has to alter the speed of a ball while the other tilts
the angle of a wall from which the ball is going to bounce off. We
build a round table (screen) because we believe that by standing
orbitally the children can better
communicate because they don't loose sight of
each other that quickly while interacting. Also children have a higher
motor activity and when they want to change position we think it's
easier to move along a round table than a squared one. To correspond
to the top view of the table, our game shares a birds eye view only.
Therefore each side of the table is equally good to play at.
An early work in progress state of Touching
Newton was presented at the poster session
of the 12th International
Conference on Human-Computer Interaction which was held in Beijing,
China. You can download
the poster here. There is also a paper
available here.
If you want to see the table in action you can watch the following
video. It shows an interface programmed by Nick
Alexander Mann for the 'Wave Field Synthesis' room at the Deutsche
Telekom Laboratories.
