Recognizing the strategic importance of ubiquitous computing as a revolutionary new technology, the university has invested £500k to construct a unique ubiquitous computing infrastructure around the university campus (the eCampus). eCampus will provide the department with a totally unique research testbed for large-scale ubiquitous computing systems and should act as a catalyst for the creation of a range of experimental e-Services and inter-disciplinary research (reaching out to disciplines such as Psychology, Engineering, Sociology and New Media).

INTERMEDIA seeks to progress beyond home and device-centric convergence toward truly user-centric convergence of multimedia. Our vision is The User as Multimedia Central: the user as the point at which services (multimedia applications) and the means for interacting with them (devices and interfaces) converge. Key to our vision is that users are provided with a personalized interface and with personalized content independently of the particular set of physical devices they have available for interaction (on the body, or in their environment), and independently of the physical space in which they are situated.

MULTITAG is a research project between the Computing Department of Lancaster University and NTT DoCoMo Euro-Labs which is funded by the latter. The goal of the project is to develop new methods and applications for mobile interactions with multi-tagged objects.

The NEMO project is an EPSRC-funded collaborative effort by the Departments of Computing, Management Science and Psychology at Lancaster University aimed at the inter-disciplinary investigation of ubiquitous computing technologies and embedded wireless systems for industrial workplaces. The focal point of the project is the development and use of ‘smart artefacts’, i.e. work-related objects such as tools and containers augmented with embedded computing, sensing and wireless communication capabilities.

The locations and orientations of objects on surfaces are required by numerous applications, especially in the fields of mobile computing, computer-supported cooperative work, and user interfaces. The objective of this project is to investigate sensing technologies and systems appropriate for collaborative positioning on surfaces. In such a system, small, wireless objects perform peer-to-peer sensing and produce relative location and orientation estimates without relying on pre-existing infrastructure.

Technologies and paradigms for interaction on any surface in an environment using moveable projection and vision-based interfaces.

The VoodooIO concept is based on deconstructing the interface into atomic units of control – such as buttons, switches, knobs, sliders and lights – and a substrate material that allows individual units to be aggregated and spatially organized into control surfaces distributed across the environment.

VoodooIO enables interaction environments where controls can be freely and ad hoc assigned of meaning and purpose through physical arrangement, spatial layout, and software association. The effect is a malleable interface which can be constructed, adapted and modified in real-time.

CoBIs (Collaborative Business Items) will make it possible to apply networked embedded systems technologies in large-scale business processes and enterprise systems by developing a platform for directly handling processes at the relevant point of action rather than in a centralized back-end system. Project objectives include modeling embedded business services, developing the collaborative and technology frameworks for CoBIs with necessary management support, and investigating and evaluating CoBIs in real world application trials in the oil and gas industry.

The CommonSense project aims to investigate the integration of multiple diverse sensors for user-level context acquisition in wearable and ubiquitous computing. The context acquisition method can be thought of as an abstract sensor for detecting context within a set of user situations for which the sensor is configured and trained.

Cubicle is a multifaceted, multi-sensory wireless tangible input device. While its physical attributes are modular to fit user preference and ability, Cubicle functionality is established by a set of well-defined, non-verbal dynamics. Cubicle can be used to reduce the complexity of current mobile technologies and to map the most commonly used functions to non-verbal dynamics that make sense to a particular application.

Equator is a six-year Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) supported by EPSRC that focuses on the integration of physical and digital interaction. Equator research challenges address fundamental research issues arising from the interweaving of the physical and digital. Research challenges define both the technical and conceptual foundations for Equator.

A wearable sensor network for user-level activity recognition. The website gives all information to build a wearable sensor system wich can read data from 30 sensors, if their output is in pulse width modulation (PWM). All components are relatively cheap and available off-the-shelf, and multiple modules can be attached to one wearable computer, one for each available serial port. This way, a network of hundreds of sensors can be attached directly to most types of computers.

Pin&Play is a novel device infrastructure that provides power and ad hoc networking through common surfaces to the objects that are attached. The technology is based on conductive sheets that are invisibly embedded (for instance under the wall paper) and physical connectors that are based on common pushpins. (See also the related project VoodooIO).

The Smart-Its project is interested in a far-reaching vision of computation embedded in the world. In this vision, mundane everyday artefacts become augmented as soft media, able to enter into dynamic digital relationships. In our project, we approach this vision with development of "Smart-Its" - small-scale embedded devices that can be attached to everyday objects to augment them with sensing, perception, computation, and communication. We think of these "Smart-Its" as enabling technology for building and testing ubiquitous computing scenarios, and we will use them to study emerging functionality and collective context-awareness of information artefacts.

UbiMon is aimed at addressing general issues related to using wearable and implantable sensors for distributed mobile monitoring. As an exemplar, the value of the research is to be demonstrated in the management of patients with arrhythmic heart disease. This is motivated by the fact that cardiovascular disease remains the major cause of mortality and morbidity in the industrialised world despite significant progress in its prevention and treatment.

Weight surfaces that use Smart-Its to allow strain gauges to measure weight on different surfaces and exploit it as an interactive resource. Design proposals simultaneously point to directions for domestic electronic furniture as a topic for design and for weight sensing as a tool for interaction.