Applications

The Notice Board with Smart Pins

In order to stress our focus on small and ordinary objects, we set out to augmenting the ordinary corkboard and drawing pins one can find in most home- or office environments. The augmented pins are small, cheap and can be dynamically added or removed from the board, just like their traditional counterparts.

Each pin contains information about the document it holds to the notice board, such as importance and time of expiration. When the document expires, it signals the user that it should be removed by flashing its onboard light. No more cluttered notice boards!

[See the workshops section for related scenarios.]

The Dynamic Wall Switch

To illustrate that any wall-mounted object can be augmented in the same fashion as in the previous application, we focused our attention to one of the most common objects found on a wall: wall switches that control the lights in a room. Instead of the electrician deciding for you where these switches belong, one can put the Pin&Play three-layered surface as wallpaper on the wall and use an augmented switch.

The Pin&Play Network as Clothing

This demonstrator uses the Pin&Play network as a wearable network, to interconnect various wearable devices, from mobile phones to wearable sensors. Imagine one would like to know the temperature distribution over the entire area of a piece of clothing while it is being worn, during a certain period (covering hours, days, or possibly even months). We made some temperature logger pins and connected them to a flexible Pin&Play surface.

Pin&Mix: Physical Interaction Tools

To experiment a bit more with pins as actuators and input devices, two new types of Pin&Play pins were built: one that has a dial (input), and one that has a multi-colour RGB LED. This way, by attaching a multicolour LED pin and three pins with dials to the surface, one can assemble a colour picker tool.

The Pin&Play Project