Computer Laboratory

Visual and Tangible Interaction

Alan Blackwell, Zhen Bai

Many new user interfaces, including touch, gesture, augmented reality and tangible interfaces create new ways of experiencing and structuring information. Psychological insights into visual perception and tactile or embodied information structures allow us to interact with digital structures via interfaces that can be very different to the conventional mouse and keyboard.

Alan Blackwell was one of the founders of the international conference series on Diagrams and their applications, and has given keynote addresses at meetings such as IEEE Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing. In addition to over 50 papers on visual representation, the same principles have also been applied to tangible user interfaces, in a manner that we describe as "Solid Diagrams". A further 30 publications on tangible and embodied interaction describe the results of this research.