The price drop of many integrated hardware components, esp. embeddable motheboards, cameras or servo-motors fascinates me in the breadth of possibilities it creates for people who like to experiment with hardware and software. I found the VJ scene to be very rich in hardware/software cross-pollenation, and so is some of the electro music scene (Jean-Michel Jarre is known for creating his own instruments).

In the same vein, I just found this video that demoes the Reactable interface which is a tangebile (ie. physical) interface for creating music by arranging units (if you know Reaktor, that's very similar). The video presents the different modules and how they interact together.

Reactable Tangible Interface

Now, once the "wow" effect wears out (it takes some time ;), you can take a step back and think about what's the difference between this and a mouse/keyboard + screen interface. I think it takes seeing it in live action, where many people use it simultaneously, like at this show in Berlin to fully understand the effect of tangible interfaces.

Not only do these kind of interfaces remove the unnecessary context of computers as we know them (operating system, desktop interface), but it also changes their main human-interaction devices : the screen is replaced by a surface that is both where you see things and where you interact. This is a straight departure from the current keyboard+mice/screen paradigm, where the location of the interaction is separate from the location of the feedback.

I think that this allows a much more immersive way of using something, while also creating the notion of the surface (or table in this case) to be a standalone, self-contained, almost alive entity. Of course, musicians and artists are people who can have immediate benefit from such a paradigm shift, as this actually brings the interaction closer to the type if interaction they would have with a "natural" instrument.

I'm pretty sure that there are some fields, more "serious" fields, where people would get great benefits from such interfaces. The first that comes to mind, and which is somehow well represented by Reactable, is collaborative work where people have to gather and put something together. I can also see interactive graphs that would be projected on the middle of a conference table, where people could interactively explore and manipulate their dataset (a company sales, a website traffic log) -- turning this abstract mass of data into a tangible representation.

The challenge that has still to be taken is to find more real-world applications for all these amazing new perspectives, but thanks to the low-cost of technology and the availability of so much processable information, the barrier is very low, and I think we can expect very soon many great new applications that will touch our daily lives.