Hands and fingers

Abstract

We describe a practical vision of ubiquitous computing with tangible interfaces, that orbits around an individual and is mediated by his or her personal consumer electronic devices. We illustrate this with a software and hardware platform for creating a personal area network of information accessories, connecting people physically with network-accessible information.The toolkit hardware consists of a Bluetooth-connected microcontroller to which input sensors and output actuators are connected. The software component consists of a networking library residing on the microcontroller, and a corresponding application on a handheld consumer electronics device that routes data between the Bluetooth modules and the Internet. This platform is used to create three examples of locally networked consumer objects that expose their inputs and outputs to a wide area network.