TouchCounters: designing interactive electronic labels for physical containers

  • Authors:
  • Paul Yarin;Hiroshi Ishii

  • Affiliations:
  • MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, E15 (-444, -485), Cambridge, MA;MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, E15 (-444, -485), Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We present TouchCounters, an integrated system of electronicmodules, physical storage containers, and shelving surfaces for thesupport of collaborative physical work. Through physical sensorsand local displays, TouchCounters record and display usage historyinformation upon physical storage containers, thus allowing accessto this information during the performance of real-world tasks. Adistributed communications network allows this data to be exchangedwith a server, such that users can access this information fromremote locations as well.Based upon prior work in ubiquitous computing and tangibleinterfaces, TouchCounters incorporate new techniques, includingusage history tracking for physical objects and multi-displayvisualization. This paper describes the components, interactions,implementation, and conceptual approach of the TouchCounterssystem.