Eingebettete interaktive Systeme: Zurück zur realen Welt

The maturing of reliable wireless communication technologies for local and personal area networks, the broad availability of miniaturized sensor and actuator hardware technologies, and the tremendous growth of global networks like the Internet over the past years have accelerated the emergence of “networked embedded systems”. So called “smart appliances”, i.e. ad-hoc networked, mobile, autonomous, special purpose computing appliances have appeared, usually interacting with their environment implicitly via a variety of sensors on the input side, and actuators on the output side. With the embedding of invisible technology into everyday things and architectural spaces, things and spaces also become the interface to “hidden” or “invisible” computational services. Embedded interactive systems allow to mediate between the physical and digital (or virtual) world via natural interaction – away from the desktop displays and keyboards. The embedding of sophisticated sensor, actuator and wireless communication technologies, together with novel interface concepts for situated interaction (tangible interfaces, attentive interfaces) give rise for bringing the interaction with computers “back to the real world”.