Readers may recall Silke Hilsing’s flexible interface prototype, Impress, (mentioned here), which allows users to squeeze and grope their information, modifying its features. Another Hilsing project, Virtual Gravity, gives a physical weight to data, with heaviness depending on, for instance, an item’s importance or popularity.
The point? I’m not quite sure. But it’s pretty and it’s blue.
It is very pretty. But… why?
It’s easy to see applications of the Impress interface, but the Virtual Gravity tool isn’t so obvious. I don’t quite see what it achieves that couldn’t be done with, say, a simple chart. (If, for instance, you wanted an immediate impression of the relative popularity of this compared to that, size rather than weight seems a more obvious way to register it.) Maybe it’s more about idle amusement. Or as Hilsing puts it, “digital data get an actual physical existence and become a sensually tangible experience.”