iCandy: A Tangible User Interface for iTunes

For more than half a century, musicians used artwork as a way of visually describing the contents of an album. "Cover art" attracts attention, reminds the listener of the contents, and when printed on the album cover, provides a tangible representation of the music that's easily used for organization and sharing. Over the past few decades, the benefits of the physical album "package" were lost as it changed from a 12" vinyl album to an electronic file and thumbnail image downloaded from an online music store. In this demonstration we present a tangible user interface called iCandy that restores the benefits of physical albums for the electronic music in the iTunes multimedia application and provides a method for easy access to recorded media. The system also includes several desktop visualizations that enhance the overall experience especially when dealing with large collections of music and video.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• itunes
• multimedia
• albums
• artwork
• music
• video
• paper
• tokens

[eirvine07]

if you have such a large database and you have a song in mind then do you think it would be worth going through the hundreds of possible cards you might have rather than just finding it in the same manner on iTunes itself?? or you could just do a search for the artist in itunes which would be faster...

[margaritaquihuis]

Depending on the size of your database, it's faster to scan then to scroll and find the song. It's really fast for retrieving links - and it's really fast for mobile browsing. Ever try to type a url on a phone?

[UraharaShoten]

Or you could just....you know....click on the song instead of going through all this trouble. No offense, but I feel like this idea would be more of a hassle than it's worth.

[starshockey10]

that's such an awesome idea! i hope it comes out!

[riccardogiraldi]

I like your idea.

hope you'll be able to commercialize it.