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Magic Paper active sketch |
Natural Interaction enables a novel form of interaction with software,
making it possible to describe things by sketching, gesturing, and
talking about them in a way that feels completely natural, yet have a computer
understand the messy freehand sketches, casual gestures, and fragmentary
utterances that are part and parcel of such interaction. Once the sketch is
understood, the information it contains can be handed off to other applications
for simulation, design checking, design completion, or refinement.
Natural Interaction:
- has been implemented in a variety of domains, including simple 2-D mechanical devices and UML
software diagrams
- deals with the noise inherent in hand-drawn sketches
- uses a variety of knowledge sources to resolve
ambiguity
- provides modeless interaction for both sketching and editing
- allows ideas to be evaluated early in the design cycle
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Natural Interaction will let computer tools capture and understand ideas that are today
captured in pencil on scraps of paper. This capability can introduce design
capture into the earliest stages of the design process and radically shorten the
design cycle. MIT’s Design Rationale Group is working to imbue a wide variety
of surfaces with natural interaction capabilities, ranging from active whiteboards, to
tablet computers, to desktops in classrooms and benches in laboratories. This
vision of computing spans the range from tablet computer notebooks full of Natural Interaction to a new concept of desktop computing: your (physical) desktop should
compute.
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