Airflow Interaction Interface: Playful 3-D CAD and Gaming

This paper describes the vision and development of a tangible user interface (TUI) that allows ‘glassblowing-like’ interaction (IA) with a computer. The premise is that human fidelity in exerting pressure and airflow (i.e. breathing, blowing) could stimulate intuition, creative processing, and affords unconventional human-computer interaction (UHCI). The ultimate goal is to find out how the potential of the human body can be used to design, develop and analyze new spatial interaction methods that surpass performance or application possibilities of currently available techniques. Multi-modal interactions are essential to computational processing whereby the human and machine are interconnected and coupled to enhance skills (analogue and digital), support rich performance, facilitate learning and foster knowledge in design and engineering processing. This paper describes the key concept of the TUI, the graphical user interface (GUI) and the data visualizer system. We illustrate the concept with a prototype system — the Air-Flow-Interaction-Interface (AFIF), testing and experimentation — to identify underlying research issue