Musical and Advanced Interaction
- Sergi Jordà, leader
- Carles F. Julià, PhD student
- Daniel Gallardo, PhD student
- Sebastian Mealla, PhD student
- Mathieu Bosi, PhD student
This line of research started with our interest in studying musical performance and in developing interfaces for the real-time creation and exploration of music. Through the years we have approached this problem from different perspectives such as collective musical creation (Jordà, 2001) or developing a framework for the conception and design of new musical instruments (Jordà, 2005). An interesting result of these studies was the development of the Reactable (Jordà et al., 2005), an electronic music instrument that combines a tangible tabletop interface with concepts or techniques such as modular synthesis, visual programming and visual feedback.
From the technical needs of the Reactable project, we have also developed technologies such as reacTIVision (Bencina et al., 2005) for the tracking of tagged objects on tabletop surfaces or the TUIO protocol (Kaltenbrunner et al., 2005), specifically designed to simplify the communication between processes in a tangible user interface environment.
Currently, we focus our research on tabletop and tangible interaction (Jordà et al., 2010), studying how these type of interfaces can favor multi-dimensional and continuous real-time interaction, exploration and multi-user collaboration, thus expanding our areas of interest beyond the musical performance domain. Some of the topics we are exploring include: the potential of surface computing in areas such as edutainment, children, elder people and special education (Gallardo et al., 2008); the potential of these type of interfaces in complex interactive situations and in exploratory and expressive activities (Julià & Jordà, 2009); their potential for enhancing creative collaboration through effective emotional communication; and extending surface computing interaction beyond the surface. For some of these projects we collaborate with specialists from other fields, such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience, sociology and education.
