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Distributed physical interfaces with shared phidgets

Published:15 February 2007Publication History

ABSTRACT

Tangible interfaces are best viewed as an interacting collection of remotely-located distributed hardware and software components. The problem is that current physical user interface toolkits do not normally offer distributed systems capabilities, leaving developers with extra burdens such as device discovery and management, low-level hardware access, and networking. Our solution is Shared Phidgets, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping distributed physical interfaces. It offers programmers 3 ways to access and control remotely-located hardware, and the ability to create abstract devices by transforming, aggregating and even simulating device capabilities. Network communication and low-level access to device hardware are handled transparently, regardless of device location.

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  1. Distributed physical interfaces with shared phidgets

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          Reviews

          Xavier Ferre

          Shared phidgets represent a step ahead in the phidgets or physical widgets concept. Phidgets allow hardware elements to be dealt with in a simple way, just as graphical user interface widgets are dealt with. In addition, shared phidgets offer the possibility to control phidgets distributed over the Internet, so that they work together. The shared phidgets library encompasses a distributed model-view-controller approach, hiding from the programmer most of the networking details. Its architecture offers three alternative ways for phidget programming: via the shared dictionary (a common data space), via phidget objects, or via interface skins (the simplest way). This range of possibilities makes the shared phidgets toolkit a very complete proposal that may accommodate a wide variety of design programming needs. The toolkit includes a shared data space with the possibility of adding semantic metadata, and a set of high-level tools to ease the programming effort. The shared phidgets toolkit is well presented with figures that adequately illustrate the main features of the proposal. Nevertheless, the reader needs to be familiar with the phidgets concept in order to fully understand what the shared phidgets architecture has to offer. Therefore, the main audience for this paper is programmers who know the phidgets library, and might want to expand the functionality in order to work with distributed phidgets. It may also be of interest to any programmer or software engineer who is considering the use of distributed physical interfaces, even though he or she may need further information about phidgets, which can be obtained through other sources referenced in the paper. Online Computing Reviews Service

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM Other conferences
            TEI '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Tangible and embedded interaction
            February 2007
            296 pages
            ISBN:9781595936196
            DOI:10.1145/1226969
            • Conference Chairs:
            • Brygg Ullmer,
            • Albrecht Schmidt

            Copyright © 2007 ACM

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            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 15 February 2007

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            Overall Acceptance Rate393of1,367submissions,29%

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