M-ITI participation at EICS'2012 The fourth ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, June 25–28, 2012:
ToyVision: A Toolkit for Prototyping Tabletop Tangible Games
Javier Marco (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute), Eva Cerezo and Sandra Baldassarri (University of Zaragoza)
This paper presents “ToyVision”, a software toolkit aimed to make easy the prototyping of tangible games in visual based tabletop devices. Compared to other software toolkits which offer very limited and tag-centered tangible possibilities, ToyVision provides designers and developers with intuitive tools for modeling innovative tangible controls and with higher level user’s manipulations data. ToyVision is based on Reactivision open-source toolkit, which has been extended with new functionalities in its Hardware layer. The main design decision taken has been to split the Widget Layer from the lower abstraction layers. This new abstraction layer (the Widget layer) is the distinguishing feature of ToyVision and provides the developer with access to a set of encapsulated classes that give the status of any playing piece handled in the tabletop while the game is running. The toolkit has been complemented with a Graphic Assistant that gathers from the designer all the information needed by the toolkit to model all the tangible playing pieces. As a practical example, the process of prototyping a tangible game is described.
The Design of a Hardware-software Platform for Long-term Energy Eco-feedback Research
Lucas Pereira, Filipe Quintal, Nuno Jardim Nunes (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute) and Mario Berges (Carnegie Mellon University)
Researchers often face engineering problems, such as optimizing prototype costs and ensuring easy access to the collected data, which are not directly related to the research problems being studied. This is especially true when dealing with long-term studies in real world scenarios. This paper describes the engineering perspective of the design, development and deployment of a long-term real word study on energy eco-feedback, where a non-intrusive home energy monitor was deployed in 30 houses for 18 months. Here we report on the efforts required to implement a cost-effective non-intrusive energy monitor and, in particular, the construction of a local network to allow remote access to multiple monitors and the creation of a RESTful web-service to enable the integration of these monitors with social media and mobile software applications. We conclude with initial results from a few eco-feedback studies that were performed using this platform.
Follow this link for the full conference program.
