Icandy: a tangible user interface for itunes

For more than half a century, musicians used artwork as a way of visually describing the contents of an album. 'Cover art' attracts attention, reminds the listener of the contents, and when printed on the album cover, provides a tangible representation of the music that's easily used for organization and sharing. Over the past few decades, the benefits of the physical album 'package' were lost as it changed from a 12" vinyl album to an electronic file and thumbnail image downloaded from an online music store. In this demonstration we present a tangible user interface called iCandy that restores the benefits of physical albums for the electronic music in the iTunes multimedia application and provides a method for easy access to recorded media. The system also includes several desktop visualizations that enhance the overall experience especially when dealing with large collections of music and video.