Spinner: A Simple Approach to Reconfigurable User Interfaces.

This paper reports our recent development on a reconfigurable user interface. We created a system that consists of a dial type controller 'Spinner', and the GUI (Graphical User Interface) objects for the Max/MSP environment[1]. One physical controller corresponds to one GUI controller on a PC's display device, and a user can freely change the connection on the fly (i.e. associate the physical controller to another GUI controller). Since the user interface on the PC side is running on the Max/MSP environment that has high flexibility, a user can freely reconfigure the layout of GUI controllers. A single 'Spinner' control device consists of a rotary encoder with a push button to count rotations and a photo IC to detect specific patterns from the GUI objects to identify. Since 'Spinner' features a simple identification method, it is capable of being used with normal display devices like LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) or a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) and so on. A user can access multiple 'Spinner' devices simultaneously. By using this system, a user can build a reconfigurable user interface.