Hands and Fingers

a mobile platform for networked objects

Cell phones and other handheld electronics devices are gaining abilities previously reserved for personal computers, in addition to their own unique attributes. With rich UI options, powerful processors, and multiple avenues of connectivity, they are primed to host the next major HCI experience. But this shift need not be confined to the screen. Our computing experiences are dominated by activities such as social networking and information retrieval, consuming and sharing bite-sized chunks of content with little thought. The exponentially expanding flood of information from the Internet and sensors embedded in our lives is too large and varied to be represented in traditional formats, especially as screens have only shrunk. Cell phones, already at the center of this lifestyle, are well-positioned to carry us closer to invisible, ubiquitous computing.

System description

Our platform consists of Fingers, microprocessors with I/O that are embedded in personal objects, and Hand routing software running on a cell phone. These are connected by knuckles, software layers in the routing software that manage the communications hardware, such as Bluetooth or Zigbee.

The toolkit we provide is the Finger library for Arduino boards, and a Hand example application written in Python for Symbian phones. The Finger library handles serial communication over Bluetooth so that you only have to mark your functions that you want called remotely. The Hand software can connect to nearby Fingers and discover and call their functions.

Alpha download will be available soon

Projects made with Hands and Fingers

Henry Holtzman, John Kestner

Paper

John Kestner, Henry Holtzman. Hands and fingers: a mobile platform for a person-centric network of computational objects. Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction, 2010.