Inputs
A Directory of Sources for Input Technologies
Bill Buxton is developing this taxonomy of input devices for a book that he’s working on.
An input device I’ve been using lately is a little MIDI keyboard called an Oxygen 8. It has lots of knobs that allow you to control various parameters in music sampling, sequencing, or synthesis programs like Reason or Live (check out the demos - there’s plenty of interesting interface design stuff going on). I’ve been using the Oxygen 8 to change elements of a sound, stuff like the pitch, volume, and tone quality, in an effort to learn more about how they’re perceived when heard in a spatialized audio environment (think 3D sound through headphones).
To learn more about how people might interact with sound(s) in a spatialized audio environment, as opposed to just listening, we’ve been playing with the Griffin Powermate, which is this big, beautiful metal knob that connects via USB to your computer. We’re using it in a couple of ways, mostly focused around the selection of a given sound: rotating multiple sounds placed around the head, moving effects (filters, for example) to indicate focus, or moving a sound that serves as a kind of auditory pointer. One of the engineers I work with got ambitious and hooked it up to an office chair, so that the chair is the input device. Fun stuff.
Right now the challenge is to take the work we did and figure out how to communicate it to others, possibly for submission to a conference as a paper. I did a brief presentation about it a few weeks ago, and found John Thackara’s article Does Your Design Research Exist? to be helpful.