Welcome to the pin&play² Website
Presentation
This website presents the work preformed by the MRes DEAIS 2006 group Play (Zain, Pascal and Genofeva) for the Collaborative Design Project Module. It features noticeably the work performed in terms of Conceptual Design, to the prototyping being performed on PinDoctor.
Design Brief
Your design project will focus on the technology developed in the “Pin and Play” project running in the Lancaster University Computing Department. The latter focuses on developing a general architecture for constructing physical interfaces that can be ad hoc composed and adapted by their users.
Your task is to explore alternative, innovative ways of exploiting this technology, through a set of applications, others than those already developed within this project. For this, you are expected to generate a large pool of possible applications. After their evaluation, you will select couple of them and designed them in greater details. The mains constraints are defined by the technology already developed.
You will be working in two groups, each group involving participants with psychology and computer science background to enrich the pool of group resources. Each team will focus on a different theme, targeting two different dimensions of human activity. One group will search for applications aimed towards supporting work, e.g. probably in office environment but not only, while the other team will try to design applications supporting play, e.g. in indoor public spaces but not only. The teams will collaborate, in terms of evaluating each other’s design outcomes.
Pin&Play Overview
Pin&Play was originally a novel approach to networking objects through a surface, but has evolved into a growing toolkit for exploring a novel type of interface: tangible interactive surfaces. This type of interface is characterized by an augmented surface, which provides data connectivity and physical support to tangible interactive artefacts (interactors) that can be added to or removed from the surface.
When an artefact is added, it becomes connected and acquires a digital representation. When it is removed, it retains it state and form. An artefact may provide other interaction capabilities that allow it to be manipulated while it is on the surface (input), or express some information (output), providing a link between the digital and physical worlds. The surface provides the connectivity and physical support to enable this.