Last week, I attended TEI10 the leading conference for Tangible HCI. The "E" in TEI now stands for "Embodied and Embedded", previously it meant solely "Embedded". So, in how much has "Embodiment" found its way into this conference?
This year's issue of the conference had a number of highlights. They included new forms of user-powered devices (Nicolas Villar's Peppermill project), pyhsical gear-based music learning (Jamming Gear by So Kanno), new techniques for multi-touch sensing (Scanning FTIR by Jonathan Moeller and Andruid Kerne, and LED-based sensing by Florian Echtler and Thomas Pototschnig) and a really impressive gestural interface, G-Stalt, by Jamie Zigelbaum and his colleagues. The most experimental project was perhaps "Liquids, Smoke, and Soap Bubbles" by Tanja Doehring and Axel Silvester. They managed to fill soap bubbles with smoke, track them, and use them as a user interface, by projecting on them. Clearly, TEI is the space for visionary ideas, and that's good.
On the downside, I missed theory. No Heidegger, no Merleau-Ponty. No Descartes, as well. I wonder in how much such a conference would profit from theoretical investigations - such that deal with the relationship between theory and - TEI's core business - practice.
What was new in this year's TEI was day #2: A full day of workshops. I participated in the "Body Hack" workshop, which was an amazing experience. Our muscles were, through sticky electrodes, wired to the computer, which could be controlled by contracting them. At the same time, electrodes were attached to the skin that enabled the muscles to be used as an output: Through low-voltage electric shocks, caused by the computer, the muscles could be contracted. A video of the participants in the "Facial Muscle Orchestra", moving their facial muscles in sync with a music piece, will be online soon.
In comparison, TEI is more gadgety than CHI, and also more than UIST. It is interesting to see it developing - while CHI and UIST seem to be constants, TEI is going through various re-forms.