Developing Responsive and Interactive Environments with the ROSS Toolkit

Abstract

TEI researchers/designers are often discouraged from building complex interactive environments by the requirement of high technical knowledge. In this studio/workshop, we present the ROSS Toolkit that offers tools to abstract/automate low-level programming of technical details, thereby simplifying the design and programming of interactions between heterogeneous networked devices. Participants will be first introduced to the toolkit functionality to cope with different technical issues. In a second part, they will experiment with the toolkit by developing use cases of increasing complexity that will involve off-the-shelf devices, interactive surfaces, and custom-made tangible artifacts. We expect participants to learn what are the opportunities and challenges for the development of responsive and interactive environments.