Displayed Connectivity

This project combines the Display Server and the Display Addon for the Particle Microcontrollers to form a set of small displays connected directly or via the internet. These can then display states and information of each other.

Two Sample Applications

Electing display

All kinds of communication services, e.g. awareness systems like messenger and chat clients are widely used across many platfroms. Besides very different designs and capabilities, most instant messaging tools have in common that users can set their state (“idle”, “working”, “away”, …).

Although most applications have some mechanism to find out about the state of the user (e.g. measure idle time, observe screen saver), however there are many situations where users should decide this themselves (e.g. it is extremely hard to find out when a user does not want to be contacted).

Our observation so far indicates that people tend to forget to tell the system of any changes, e.g. when leaving for lunch. Especially if someone has several such systems, it can become tedious to alter all of them. Systems like Trillian may reduce the number of applications needed, but the problem of status setting remains. The tangible, unobtrusive, small displays can act as mediator between physical and virtual world, as “switch” that is easily and quickly turned. Feedback about the current state can be given by the case design itself or by presenting text or icons on the display.

I am away from my display:

Imagine several people each having one of those displays. Using the web server capabilities described in a previous section, someone can send a question or statement to the other displays. The other users can now use their devices to give a particular answer to that poll. The answers of the other participants can be visualized by short lines or dots on the display indicating which way they have placed their displays. Thus, it is also easy to quickly see the result of the poll.

One scenario would be the synchronization of some task: The moment all points are lined up on the same side, everybody is prepared to go for lunch, home etc. This implies that it has been agreed upon the meaning of each possible state of the display. This can either be done

explicitly or implicitly by having the same feedback on the display for all users.

Contact

For enquires please contact Paul Holleis (paul @ hcilab.org, http://www.hcilab.org/paul)