Configuration of the computing and communications systems found at home and in the workplace is a complex task that currently requires the attention of the user. Recently, researchers have begun to examine computers that would autonomously change their functionality based on observations of who or what was around them. By determining their context, using input from sensor systems distributed throughout the environment, computing devices could personalize themselves to their current user, adapt their behavior according to their location, or react to their surroundings. The authors present a novel sensor system, suitable for large-scale deployment in indoor environments, which allows the locations of people and equipment to be accurately determined. We also describe some of the context-aware applications that might make use of this fine-grained location information.

We introduce the concept of Graspable User Interfaces which allow direct control of electronic or virtual objects through physical handles for control. These physical artifacts are essentially new input devices which can be tightly coupled or “attached ” to virtual objects for manipulation or for expressing action (e.g., to set parameters or for initiating processes). We present three steps in the development of these ideas. First, as a note on research methodology, we outline a series of exploratory studies that were conducted. Secondly, we describe a prototype system called "Bricks " and a sample application, GraspDraw, which was developed to investigate the Graspable UI concepts and to design new one- and twohanded interaction techniques. The physical artifacts, or bricks, operate on top of a large horizontal display surface known as the ActiveDesk. Finally, we conclude by presenting a design space for Bricks which lay the foundation for further exploring and developing graspable user interfaces.

Advances in processor, memory and radio technology will enable small and cheap nodes capable of sensing, communication and computation. Networks of such nodes can coordinate to perform distributed sensing of environmental phenomena. In this paper, we explore the directed diffusion paradigm for such coordination. Directed diffusion is datacentric in that all communication is for named data. All nodes in a directed diffusion-based network are application-aware. This enables diffusion to achieve energy savings by selecting empirically good paths and by caching and processing data in-network (e.g., data aggregation). We explore and evaluate the use of directed diffusion for a simple remote-surveillance sensor network analytically and experimentally. Our evaluation indicates that directed diffusion can achieve significant energy savings and can outperform idealized traditional schemes (e.g., omniscient multicast) under the investigated scenarios.

. The proliferation ofcomputing into the physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing infrastructure; it suggests new paradigms of interaction inspired by constant access to information and computational capabilities. For the past decade, applicationdriven research in ubicomp has pushed three interaction themes: natural interfaces, context-aware applications, and automated capture and access. To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, we review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. Research in ubiquitous computing implicitly requires addressing some notion of scale; whether in the number and type of devices, the physical space of distributed computing or the number of people using a system. We posit a new area of applications research, everyday computing, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time. Just as pushing the availability of computing away from the traditional desktop fun...

The widespread deployment of inexpensive communications technology, computational resources in the networking infrastructure, and network-enabled end devices poses an interesting problem for end users: how to locate a particular network service or device out of hundreds of thousands of accessible services and devices. This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a secure Service Discovery Service (SDS). Service providers use the SDS to advertise complex descriptions of available or already running services, while clients use the SDS to compose complex queries for locating these services. Service descriptions and queries use the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to encode such factors as cost, performance, location, and device- or service-specific capabilities. The SDS provides a highlyavailable, fault-tolerant, incrementally scalable service for locating services in the wide-area. Security is a core component of the SDS and, where necessary, communications are both encrypt...

extension of a project to investigate interaction with large high resolution displays. It was initially set up in a busy laboratory where the device proved to be no more than a curiosity, since it could not be practically used for long periods of time and offered little integration with other

One potentially useful feature of future computing environments is the ability to capture the live experiences of the occupants and to provide that record to users for later access and review. Over the last 3 years, we have designed and extensively used a particular instrumented environment, the classroom, designed to facilitate the easy capture of the traditional lecture experience. We will describe the history of the Classroom 2000 project at Georgia Tech, and provide results of extended evaluations of the impact of automated capture on the teaching and learning experience. In addition to understanding the impact of automated capture in this educational domain, there are many important lessons to take away from this long-term, largescale experiment with a living ubiquitous computing environment. The environment needs to address issues of scale and extensibility, and there needs to be a way to continuously evaluate the effectiveness of the environment and understand and react to the w...

We describe the i-LAND environment which constitutes an example of our vision of the workspaces of the future, in this case supporting cooperative work of dynamic teams with changing needs. i-LAND requires and provides new forms of human-computer interaction and new forms of computer-supported cooperative work. Its design is based on an integration of information and architectural spaces, implications of new work practices and an empirical requirements study informing our design. i-LAND consists of several ‘roomware ’ components, i.e. computer-augmented objects integrating room elements with information technology. We present the current realization of i-LAND in terms of an interactive electronic wall, an interactive table, two computer-enhanced chairs, and two “bridges” for the Passage-mechanism. This is complemented by the description of the creativity support application and the technological infrastructure. The paper is accompanied by a video figure in the CHI’99 video program.

The role of computers in the modern office has tended to split our activities between virtual interactions in the realm of the computer and physical interactions with real objects that have been part of the traditional office infrastructure. This paper discusses a variety of scenarios we have implemented in which the physical world can be invisibly and seamlessly augmented with electronic tags in order to connect physical objects with virtual representations or computational functionality. We demonstrate the utility of linking physical objects to electronic services and actions that are naturally associated with their form (e.g., a dictionary and a web-based translation service). Unlike previous work in this area, we have focused on uniquely combining four inexpensive technologies with off-the-shelf applications, everyday objects, and computational devices. KEYWORDS: RFID tag, ubiquitous computing, tangible interface, physical UI, phicon, augmented reality. INTRODUCTION Six years ag...

For more than thirty years, people have relied primarily on screen-based text and graphics to interact with computers. Whether the screen is placed on a desk, held in one's hand, worn on one's head, or embedded in the physical environment, the screen has cultivated a predominantly visual paradigm of human-computer interaction. In this chapter, we discuss a growing space of interfaces in which physical objects play a central role as both physical representations and controls for digital information. We present an interaction model and key characteristics for such "tangible user interfaces," and explore these characteristics in a number of interface examples. This discussion supports a newly integrated view of both recent and previous work, and points the way towards new kinds of computationally-mediated interfaces that more seamlessly weave together the physical and digital worlds.