The Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI '10) conference was held in Cambridge, MA, this week. Technologists and designers from around the world gathered to demonstrate projects exploring the blurring of physical and digital user interfaces. Here are some of the most interesting projects from the conference.

A Physically Responsive Map

This tabletop display shows 3-D shapes on a moving, flexible surface. The display changes shape in response to users' touch; for example, a map was projected onto miniature mountain ranges, and an image of the brain was contorted to reflect its shape.

"You could have an image of the body and dig into it and feel the heart beating," says MIT research assistant Daniel Leithinger, one of the creators of the project.

Interactive Art Cobots

Christian Cerrito, a graduate student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is developing interactive art displays with collaborative robots called cobots. One of his cobots draws yellow circles until it receives an audio sound (someone clapping or shouting, for example), and then it draws a dashed line. Another changes its designs in response to light and shadow. In the future, Cerrito says he would like to use bigger robots in a public space for an interactive art exhibit.

A Tangible, Digital Jukebox

Researchers at the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain are using this project to explore the importance of physical objects associated to music--vinyl or CDs, for example. Their tabletop display consists of an infrared camera and projector beneath a sheet of Plexiglas. Small pieces of paper with dots underneath are traced by the camera below the glass. A user can use a piece of paper as a playlist.

An Augmented Reality Pattern Table

With this multiuser, augmented reality table, users can experiment with digital and physical patterns and shapes. A projector and infrared camera beneath the table lets a user "pick up" an image or video clip with plastic tiles and remix them to make new patterns. Arranging these augmented geometric tiles could give children a fun and interactive tool to learn about mathematical shapes, according to MIT graduate student Sean Follmer.

A Soap Bubble Display

This soap bubble display was designed by Axel Sylvester from the University of Hamburg and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

The machine spits bubbles onto a soapy surface; below, a camera tracks the bubbles, which a user can move by blowing or gently dragging a finger. Moving the bubbles lets the user control lights, or images projected onto them. "We use it to think about the materiality of tangible [objects]," says Sylvester.

Videos by Kristina Grifantini, edited by Brittany Sauser

Credit: Jon Rafman/Google

The folks at NPR's Picture Show blog have collected a slideshow of beautiful, wistful, dramatic moments on the street caught by Google's Street View. In 2007, Google sent cars carrying an eyelike sphere fitted with nine cameras to capture images for its Street View application. In the blog they jokingly compare the Internet giant to some of the greats of street photography, but looking at the collection of accidental images makes you wonder.

The NPR story was inspired by this essay by Montreal artist Jon Rafman about curating screenshots from the web service. The essay makes a case for Street View as an art project and a cultural text in whose images we can read almost anything. Photos of sprawled homeless people and buildings on fire suggest "a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history," Rafman writes. "For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension." On the other hand, the cameras also captured small moments of joy on the sidewalk--a couple lifting their child off the ground by both her hands, for example. From the essay:

One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

Credit: Jon Rafman/Google