Interactive Design Studio: A spatial-computing framework fro non-IT specialists

In recent years, application domains outside information technology such as architecture have shown an increasing interest in the capabilities of networked systems such as localized computation, reduced power-consumption, and distributed interaction. These capabilities incline the design of interactive environments towards the IT-domain. In particular the employment of large scale distributed systems in interactive designs bring along new challenges for architects/designer such as distributed algorithm design, programming skills, embedded platform knowledge. As a consequence of this new trend, adequate software tools to bridge the gap between the IT-world and the field of interactive design are scarce. In order to fill that gap we propose a framework called Interactive Design Studio(IDS) which aims to provide the necessary tools to hide the technological aspects from the end-user when designing interactive environments. To tackle the problem of handling large scale networks of embedded platforms we are convinced that spatial computing is a promising paradigm. The main reasons are the scalability(network size does not influence node behavior) and resiliency to network dynamics(network is hidden by space abstraction). Therefore we present a spatial computing framework for non-IT specialists. We provide a way to specify agent-level behavior and to generate the corresponding code for a specific embedded platform. In our case, we use the eLua VM enhanced with the necessary spatial computing capabilities. We show that spatial computing is a good methodology for Industrial Design and Architecture. Moreover, we show that spatial computing is possible using off-the-shelf virtual machines for embedded platforms. In conclusion, we demonstrate that IDS succeeds within a certain extent in abstracting or hiding the underlying technological aspects(spatial computing) from end-users.

Subject

spatial computing
interactive design

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Student theses

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master thesis

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