David Merrill, Joseph A. Paradiso

Abstract

We present a new model for configuring the connections between user input and system output in a physical interface with diverse sensor degrees of freedom across several input modalities. Our system allows a user to demonstrate input gestures and manipulations directly to the system, teaching it the desired mappings by example. We developed a musical control application in which userdefined gestures and user-assigned manipulations trigger and modify sounds. The effectiveness of our system was tested by experimentally comparing our user-definable system to a similar, pre-configured version. The results suggest that users prefer to actively configure a physical interface to having expertly-configured presets. In addition, we propose our model as a more general mapping discovery tool for physical interface designers.