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The electronics-centered approach to physical computing presents challenges when designers build tangible interactive systems due to its inherent emphasis on circuitry and electronic components. To explore an alternative physical computing approach we have developed a computer vision (CV) based system that uses a webcam, computer, and printed fiducial markers to create functional tangible interfaces. Through a series of design studios, we probed how designers build tangible interfaces with this CV-driven approach. In this paper, we apply the annotated portfolio method to reflect on the fifteen outcomes from these studios. We observed that CV markers offer versatile materiality for tangible interactions, afford the use of democratic materials for interface construction, and engage designers in embodied debugging with their own vision as a proxy for CV. By sharing our insights, we inform other designers and educators who seek alternative ways to facilitate physical computing and tangible interaction design. 

While cross-disciplinary collaboration continues to be a cornerstone of inventive work in interactive design, the infrastructures of academia, as well as barriers to participation imposed by our professional organizations, make collaboration between particular groups difficult. In this workshop, we will focus specifically on how artist residencies are addressing (or not addressing) the challenges that artists, craftspeople, and/or independent designers face when collaborating with researchers affiliated with DIS. By focusing on the question “what is mutual benefit?”, this workshop seeks to combine the perspectives of artists and academic researchers who collaborate with artists (through residencies or other forms of sustained collaboration) to (1) reflect on benefits or deficiencies in what the residency research model is currently doing and (2) generate resources for our community to effectively structure and evaluate our methods of collaboration with artists. Our hope is to provide recognition of the research contributions of artists and pathways for equitable inclusion of artists as a first step towards broader infrastructural change. 

We present Beholder, a computer vision (CV) toolkit for building tangible controllers for interactive computer systems. Beholder facilitates designers to build physical inputs that are instrumented with CV markers. By observing the properties of these markers, a CV system can detect physical interactions that occur. Beholder provides a software editor that enables designers to map CV marker behavior to keyboard events; thus connecting the CV-driven tangible controllers to any software that responds to keyboard input. We propose three design scenarios for Beholder—controllers to support everyday work, alternative controllers for games, and transforming physical therapy equipment into controllers to monitor patient progress.