When offering concrete interactions to an audience, it helps a great deal to let them know what they can grab. The cursor turns into a hand when the user rolls the cursor in proximity of the grippies. As in discrete engagements, concrete interface elements invite the participant to approach the content with clear intentions, but act on them in an explicit and kinesthetic fashion. Again, participants are in complete control of the pace. By touching, pulling, pushing, panning, tearing, stretching, smudging, grabbing, dropping and throwing, they can construct, manipulate, organize and design.
Concrete interactions can be extremely satisfying because the actors affect their world directly.
With smarter software, one can support richer experiences via proximity sensitivity, edge and surface detection and simulations of friction and gravity. In character interactions the participant is a player experiencing the world through, or with, a character who lives in the content space, often by manipulating the actions of that character. Thus, character interactions are literally second-person. This style is often aimed towards children, in which case it relies on simple actions carried out with convincing animation. We may find, though, that a combination of concrete and character interactions proves useful in virtual spaces for all ages.