Related Work

M ost traditional computing systems and applications research treats software as the variable and hardware as the constant. In ubiquitous computing research, it’s difficult to maintain this perspective. A defining characteristic of ubiquitous computing systems is embodying physical context and interaction with a given physical locale rather than abstracting from it.1 Generally, ubiquitous computing is based on a trend that leads away from general-purpose hardware for applications and user interfaces toward more task-specific and varied devices.2 So, designing software for ubiquitous computing applications becomes entwined with designing the physical system components. Researchers who build ubiquitous computing systems to explore their properties increasingly must prototype hardware. This creates a quandary, because researchers interested in ubiquitous computing’s challenges and potential typically come from software-centric backgrounds such as distributed systems and user interface engineering. Such researchers can’t develop ubiquitous computing applications without suitable hardware, but designing suitable hardware requires understanding how the hardware fits into the application environment.3 We aim to lower the hurdle for physically prototyping ubiquitous computing systems by facilitating the study of systems composed of everyday artifacts augmented with physical I/O and wireless networking. Our work, which uses small computing devices called Smart-Its, addresses the need to create embedded interactive systems that disappear from the foreground to become secondary to the physical objects with which people interact during everyday activities. Such systems create new design challenges related to prototyping with embedded technologies and require careful consideration of the physical design context.