The goal of the course project is to give you hands-on experience designing and prototyping applications that run in a pervasive computing environment. This semester’s theme is North Quad. We will be imagining and prototyping augmentations to North Quad that will enhance the experience of living and working here. North Quad is an especially interesting site because it contains a number of different types of environments. There are classrooms, meeting rooms, labs, offices, informal meeting spaces, group offices, dorms, a cafeteria, and several different campus units, not to mention numerous lobbies, hallways, stairwells, and elevators that connect all of these spaces. Each project will consider how to use technology to enhance the experience of inhabiting, occupying, or passing through one or more of these spaces. In addition, the projects will focus on applications that are context-aware and social. By context-aware, I mean that the application changes its behavior based on conditions in the immediate physical environment. This means that the application can change based on who is in a particular space, the activities currently occurring in that space, or other properties (e.g., sound level, light level, temperature). By social, I mean that the purpose of the application is to, in some way, facilitate interaction between people. These are intentionally broad constraints but constraints nonetheless. We will be continually discussing and reinterpreting these constraints as time goes on, but these define at least the general shape of the design space we will be exploring.
Pervasive Computing in North Quad