COMB is a tangible user interface (TUI) concept designed for child-oriented musical interaction and education by the name of COMB. The interaction concept of the interface is based upon the natural behavior and metaphors found in children's play during construction with building-blocks. This paradigm is used to increase the accessibility of the otherwise expert-focused digital and electronic music to children. We evaluated our prototype during two different study setups. We found preliminary indications that this concept fosters imitation during learning. Therefore, the usage of shape as a meaningful element of interaction could be a promising design strategy for interfaces addressing children. In this paper we present the theoretical foundation of the concept as well as technical details of the prototype. Furthermore, we discuss how this concept can be applied to increase accessibility of technology in various other domains.
You can find a project video on vimeo.
The project was published at TEI'19 and PerDis'18:
Beat Rossmy and Alexander Wiethoff. 2019. COMB -- Shape as a Meaningful Element of Interaction. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 287–295. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3294109.3295646
Beat Rossmy and Alexander Wiethoff. 2018. COMB: A Modular Low-Resolution Display to Support Electronic Musical Pre-Education. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 24, 1–2. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3205873.3210700