Phidgets: Easy Development of Physical Interfaces through Physical Widgets

1
Phidgets Easy Development of Physical Interfaces
through Physical Widgets

• Saul Greenberg, Chester Fitchett
• University of Calgary

2
Outline

• Introduction
• Motivation
• Architecture
• Evaluation
• Project Videos
• Conclusions

3
Introduction

• Phidget lt-gt Widget
• Physical UI lt-gt GUI
• Abstract and package I/O devices
• Hiding implementation and construction details,
  and exposing functionality through a well-defined
  API

4
Motivation

• Difficulty of developing and combining physical
  devices and interfacing them to conventional
  programming languages.
• Hard to build unless background in electronics
• Commercially available devices have no API
• Developers may not have devices available at
  early stages of their programming effort

5
Architecture
(USB)
6
Project Videos

• HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) course
• Videos(http//grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/phidgets/g
  allery/)
• Flower in Bloom
• Waterfall Harp
• Nerf Email
• MSN Slider

7
Evaluation

• Having no formal evaluation
• Successfully completed the projects
• Most of effort was spent in physical construction
• Little time working on the software
• Demonstrations were accompanied by positive
  exclamations and by clapping

8
Conclusions

• Greatly simplifies programming devices
• Programmers using Phidgets can rapidly develop
  physical interfaces
• http//www.phidgets.com/

9
QA

• Thank you