Physical Prototyping with Smart-Its

Abstract

Exploring novel ubiquitous computing systems and applications inevitably requires prototyping physical components. Smart-Its are hardware and software components that augment physical objects with embedded processing and interaction to address this need. 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.