Interactive Spaces: Model for Motion based Music Applications
With the extensive utilization of touch screens, smartphones and various reactive surfaces, reality based and intuitive interaction styles have now become customary. The employment of larger interactive areas, like floors or peripersonal three dimensional spaces, further increase the reality based interaction affordances, allowing full body involvement and the development of a co located, shared user experience. Embodied and spatial cognition play a fundamental role for the interaction in this kind of spaces, where users act in the reality with no device in the hands and obtain an audio and graphical output depending on their movements. Starting from the early experiments of Myron Krueger in 1971, responsive floors have been developed through various technologies including sensorized tiles and computer vision systems, to be employed in learn ing environments, entertainment, games and rehabilitation. Responsive floors allow the spatial representation of concepts and for this reason are suitable for immediate communication and engagement. As many musical features have meaningful spatial representations, they can easily be reproduced in the physical space through a conceptual blending approach and be made available to a great number of users. This is the key idea for the design of the original music applications presented in this thesis. The applications, devoted to music learning, production and active listening, introduce a novel creative approach to music, which can be further assumed as a general paradigm for the design of motion based learning environments. Application assessment with upper elementary and high school students has proved that users engagement and bodily inter action have a high learning power, which can be a valid resource for deeper music knowledge and more creative learning processes. Although further interface tests showed that touch screen interaction performs better than full body interaction, some important guidelines for the design of reactive floors applications have been obtained on the basis of these test results. Moreover, the conceptual framework developed for the design of music applications can represent a valid paradigm also in the general field of human computer interaction.