Case Study - ReacTable

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The reactable intends to be:

• collaborative: several performers (locally or remotely)
• intuitive: zero manual, zero instructions
• sonically challenging and interesting
• learnable and masterable (even for children)
• suitable for novices (installations) and advanced electronic musicians (concerts)

The important feature that we found interesting is the player's ability move around the 'phicons' to lead lazer beam to the direction you've intended; however this action has increased difficulty as this is a collaborative gameplay, which needs multiplayers to play the game.

We are exploring ways of both improving the quality and broadening the bandwith of interaction between people and digital information by allowing the players to 'grasp & manipulate' tangible objects and enabling players to work collaboratively to achieve a shared goal. We wish to introduce our collaborative game play to induce challenge and communication amongst players, which will ultimately be learnable and masterable for people of any age.

Reference List

Music Technology Group. 2007. reactable.http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/ (Accessed August 13, 2007).