Formloupe is an augmented reality (AR) experience, situated in furniture retail stores, allowing users to customise and design furniture and rooms. It is the culmination of a master's thesis research project by Ajla Ćano and Daniel Roeven.

AR is a relatively new medium, and new interaction patterns are being still being discovered and created. Questions and topics central to this research project are:

1. What can we learn from the wealth of existing research on interaction styles when creating new interaction patterns and models that suit AR?
2. What interaction opportunities can this new medium offer that touchscreen interaction can't?
3. How can we use this new medium to advance existing interaction styles and overcome their limitations?

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Smarthome controls are clunky, so Bastian Andelefski developed an alternative. With precise indoor positioning technology (using the ultra-wideband chips in modern phones), one can point at any connected light bulb (or other smarthome device, like a thermostat), and relevant controls will pop up on the phone.

It's an intuitive way of turning on and off smart home lights—certainly a lot better than scrolling through a list of connected lights and reading the lamp names to find the one you want to toggle. I think it nicely exemplifies how ubiquitous computing (in this case, a mobile phone + ultra-wideband positioning beacons + smart light bulbs) can give rise to embodied interaction: the bodily movement required, both in pointing and in …

Musical instruments really are a fun playground for interaction design. OWOW makes a set of MIDI controllers that differentiate themselves through unique gestural, embodied interactions. Wave your hand above a distance sensor to trigger a drum, rotate a 3DOF movement sensor to fade effects in and out, or scroll over a drawing to produce notes—some interactions might seem more useful than others, but it is inspiring to see how simple off-the-shelf electronic sensors can give rise to varied bodily interactions.

Since it is not uncommon to see this type of interaction design experimentation in musical instruments, perhaps there's something intrinsic to musical performance that lends itself well to this type of more exploratory, bodily …

Mediated Body is a portable system invented by Mads Hobye, wherein a performer wearing an interactive suit provokes an engaging experience with a stranger¹. The suit is able to pick up skin on skin contact between the performer and participant, which generates a soundscape that plays back in the headphones worn by both parties. In addition to the sounds, the suit creates ambient coloured light effects to both enhance the touch dynamic and to draw more attention from others in the surroundings. In this way, the suit playfully excuses physical touch between two people that have not met before – breaking the taboo of not being allowed to touch.

Mediated Body essentially makes an interface out of the performer’s and participant’s bodies, …

The Mimu gloves are a musical input device. Through various continuous hand gestures the artist can control various musical effects, like high- or low-pass filters, panning, reverb, etc. Gestures can also be linked discrete controls, such as starting, stopping or dropping a recorded loop. On paper, it is a wearable MIDI controller, which instead of knobs and buttons uses bodily movement.

In practice, however, it enables something that's greater than the sum of its parts. It allows the artist, who might be singing a vocal part at the same time, to have detailed and accessible control over their sound. Instead of fiddling with an industrial controller filled with knobs and buttons, the Mimu gloves enable meaningful and expressive movement. …

Nintendo Labo is a clever way to augment videogaming with a physical counterpart. With foldable pieces of cardboard, one constructs various toys that the Nintendo Switch can slot into. The different sensors and actuators on the Switch then interact with the cardboard models, creating fishing rods, pianos, motorcycles, robots, and more.

It looks incredibly fun to play with, both as a kid, fully immersed in the make-believe world, and as a parent, playing and setting it up together with your kid. Perhaps even using the in-game explanation of how it works. But beside the joyful appeal, it's very interesting from an interaction design perspective. It does away with the uniform controls of buttons and joysticks for every game. Instead, both …