MouseHaus Table, a Physical Interface for Urban Design Chen-Je Huang, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Mark D. Gross Design Machine Group University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195, USA {cj2, ellendo, mdgross}@u.washington.edu ABSTRACT MouseHaus Table is a computationally enhanced physical environment that supports collaborative urban design discussion. The system consists of a custom-made table with a rear projection screen, a video camera, projector and a simple pedestrian simulation program. MouseHaus Table provides a physical interface that enables participants who have no previous computer experience to interact with a pedestrian simulation program. KEYWORDS: tangible user interface, pedestrian simulation, urban design, collaboration. INTRODUCTION Providing urban information for public participation may improve the quality of the design process and enable the community to express design criteria and alternatives that designers might not anticipate. Interactive simulation can offer powerful tools to facilitate this discussion. MouseHaus Table provides a multi-user environment with a simple pedestrian movement simulation program to engage discussion in the urban design context. The MouseHaus Table physical interface, which uses ordinary objects in the design process, is a proof of concept prototype of a tangible user interface for collaborative design. Users show objects (for example, pieces of colored paper) of their choice under the camera and objects’ properties (for example, color) are recorded. The system allows these registered objects to represent urban elements when constructing a layout for simulation. MouseHaus Table bridges physical object manipulation, group activity, and computer simulation of pedestrian behavior. A preliminary user study showed that greater group interaction resulted when using the MouseHaus table with paper and scissors as input devices compared with using MouseHaus Table with a mouse input. SCENARIO The State Department of Transportation is in the very early planning stages for a multi-modal transportation center. The College of Architecture and Urban Planning has been asked to hold a design charrette to generate ideas for this plan. A visioning session, with a public presentation and exhibition, is planned to engage community members in discussing the neighborhood development. Figure 1 Interaction in the MouseHaus Table We provide a visioning tool, MouseHaus Table, to help collaborative stakeholders evaluate the pedestrian behavior of alternative street layouts. Stakeholders use scissors to cut out paper rectangles which represent the buildings or parks and then place them on the MouseHaus Table to create a street layout (Figure 1). The embedded simulation program in the MouseHaus Table then provides pedestrian movement feedback using the street layout. When a specific street layout is arranged and activated, the pedestrian agents start to appear on the table. These pedestrian agents perform behaviors such as moving between the buildings or resting in the parks. Stakeholders can discuss the arrangement of the different urban elements on the table. Certain layout designs may affect the pattern of pedestrian movement and impact density points in the urban space. The system can save these patterns for later discussion. Stakeholders may rearrange the street layout to produce the preferred movement pattern and density level for the urban space. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE The hardware setup for MouseHaus Table consists of a custom-made table with a rear projection screen, a video camera and projector (Figure 2). We implemented the system with common and inexpensive computer peripherals Copyright held by author/owner.