Homemade Ubicomp at Reboot 11

Homemade Ubicomp reboot11, June ‘09 Copenhagen, Denmark Mark Wubben Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 supercollider.dk http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/dk/ 1 Homemade ubiquitous computing, a talk given on June 26 2009 during reboot11 in Copenhagen, Denmark. This talk is licensed under Creative Commons. For more information, see http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/dk/deed.en_US. Please note that not all material used in this talk is licensed under Creative Commons. Such material is identiﬁed in the notes for each slide. Photo by Lali Masriera, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/visualpanic/248053838/. CC-BY-2.0.

Mark Wubben supercollider.dk / @novemberborn 2 Photo by Bryan Thatcher, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/bryanthatcher/3020368232/. CC-BY-SA- NC, used with permission.

Homemade 3 Homemade. You should be able to do this by yourself, at home, for a reasonable price. This means you don’t need to buy or hire expensive tools or even companies. Not that you’re not allowed to, of course! It’s like homemade cookies. You can make them yourself, provided you have the ingredients, some kitchen utensils, a bowl and an oven. Photo by Fabio Bruna, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/_fabio/104792456/. CC-BY 2.0.

Ubiquitous Computing 4 So what is ubicomp or Ubiquitous Computing? Wikipedia deﬁnes it as “information processing [that] has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities”. This is a broad term, and there are many different terms that all more or less mean the same thing. Such terms are Pervasive Computing, Ambient Intelligence, Physical Computing, Everyware and the Internet of Things. For our purposes today, Ubiquitous Computing is – again quoting Wikipedia – about a “post- desktop model of human-computer interaction”. This means it’s not about our laptops and external monitors, but about smart devices that we wouldn’t necessarily recognize as being a computer. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Ubiquitous_computing&oldid=271146501 Photo by Tobias Toft, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/tobiastoft/3127162911/. CC-BY 2.0.

Today 5 What I want to do today is to inspire you to start hacking on your own Ubiquitous Computing projects. Whether we like it or not, ubicomp will shape our world. It’s best to do some of the shaping ourselves, rather than letting big companies and other interests determine what our world will look like. In the next half-hour or so I’ll take you through some amazing projects. We’ll talk about tools and products you can use yourself and where to get some inspiration. But ﬁrst, let’s talk about the spirit of Homemade and this new world ubicomp may bring. Photo by Tobias Toft, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/tobiastoft/3127970010/. CC-BY 2.0.

Do It Yourself 6 The term DIY refers to people creating things themselves, without hiring professionals. In an analogue world this could be about home improvement. Or, in our digital world, about self- publishing. It blurs the lines between amateurs, doing things for the fun of it, and professionals, who supposedly know what they’re doing and get paid for it. (We’ve seen over the past few months how that’s turned out…) Photo by Fabio Bruna, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/_fabio/2354333911/. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Ham Radio 7 Take, for example, amateur radio, which is also known as ham radio. There is a large subculture of people communicating via the radio waves, outside of the regular radio channels. This is usually a hobby taken up to learn more about radio and electronics, or talk to people in different countries. Radio amateurs also do experimental work, for example in using the moon as a reﬂector for radio waves. Photo by Fabrizio Sciami, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/_fabrizio_/1788993481/. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

“I thought that amateur radio was a fascinating subject. It sparked my interest in electronics, and that's when I decided that this field was something I wanted to pursue.” Jack S. Kilby, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2000 8 Most importantly, amateur radio inspires, and can lead to Nobel prizes, as Jack Kilby shows us. From Jack Kilby’s autobiography at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/ 2000/kilby-autobio.html.

Science Kits 9 You may also be familiar with science kits, allowing children to do learn about science on the kitchen table – not in a lab. In a way, Homemade Ubicomp is a science kit for all of us. We can play with it, learn from it, experiment and innovate. Photo by Jeff Keyzer, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/mightyohm/2729474646/. CC-BY 2.0.

A Changed World 10 I hope Homemade and DIY is fun and could lead to great things. Now I’d like to focus on why it’s important. The advances of Ubiquitous Computing have the potential of dramatically changing the world. There are many upsides to this world, but also a few downsides. Photo by Dan Foy, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/orangeacid/459207903/. CC-BY 2.0.

RFID & Other Sensors 11 Ubiquitous Computing is marked by sensors and identiﬁers. For example we have RFID tags, which are small chips that communicate wirelessly with RFID readers and can contain a few kilobytes of data. They’re used in access cards, public transport systems and passports. They’re also used to track the transport of goods. It’s not hard to imagine that in the near future, your new pair of jeans will have an embedded RFID tag that can be used to not only hamper theft, but also recognize you as a customer. Ubiquitous Computing is about more than just RFID of course. Essentially, it’s about all data that can be captured through sensors: whether a door is open or closed, the temperature in a room, noise levels and so on. Photo by myuibe, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/myuibe/2439798709/. CC-BY 2.0.

Who Gets Control? 12 The big question then is who gets control over this technology, and what are the side- effects? Do you want the jeans store to recognize you and your past purchases? Or to detect that you bought your jacket from a competitor? Should the jeans store tell you about the tag in your jeans? How easy should it be to ﬁnd, so that you can destroy it? Photo by Lali Masriera, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/visualpanic/3209209460/. CC-BY 2.0.

13 Why are there RFID chips in our passports in the ﬁrst place? They’ve proven to be susceptible to eavesdropping and duplication. Sure, usually they’re encrypted, but how strong is that encryption? RFID transport cards have been completely broken. Wouldn’t a non-wireless chip have been better? Or did the RFID companies win the lobbying game? Photo by Nathan Borror, CC-BY. http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sketch22/2715170631/.

Awareness 14 The problem with Ubiquitous Computing is that we don’t have a clear understanding of the consequences. And I don’t mean just us in this room, I mean politicians, the person on the street, the CEO of a consumer electronics company. We’re not aware of the risks, and quite frankly may not be aware of the opportunities. Photo by David Goehring, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/496721450/. CC-BY 2.0.

Solve Our Own Problems 15 Homemade Ubicomp can help us and others understand the risks and ﬁnd the opportunities. Plus, we can use these new tools to solve some problems of our own! Photo by John Goodridge, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/badjonni/474558791/. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Projects 16 All right, enough of that philosophical ﬂuffy stuff. Time for some cool projects. I’ll start with projects that are really awesome, and end with some that scare me a bit. Photo by Daria Perevezentsev, http://www.mediamatic.net/page/54511/en. Licensed under Creative Commons, but it’s not clear which speciﬁc license. Used because Mediamatic is awesome and needs to be promoted as much as possible.

17 First I’d like to show you two projects made by students of the pilot year of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. You may have met them earlier this Reboot, since they’re our standby interaction designers.

18 The ﬁrst project is Message In A Bottle, by Adam Little, Alice Pintus and Ujjval Panchal. It is a bottle that shows you email messages from friends. It starts glowing when there’s an unread message, so you don’t have to continuously check your email. The bottle contains an Arduino board which is a programmable micro-processor that you can hook up to all kinds of out- and inputs; an accelerometer to detect when you turn the bottle upside down; an LCD screen to display the message; an LED to make it glow and a module for radio communication. There’s another Arduino with radio transmitter that sends emails to the bottle. Unfortunately they never got actual integration with email working, so this is still a prototype. Let’s see a video of how it’s used. Project page and video: http://dkds.ciid.dk/py/physical-computing/projects/message-in-a- bottle/

Adam Little Eilidh Dickson Siddhart Muthyala Meet The Food You Eat 19 This is another cool project. It shows the environmental impact of the food you eat. The metaphor is weighing scale: you put food on the left side, and trees on the right. Let’s have a look: Project page: http://dkds.ciid.dk/py/tangible-user-interface/projects/meet-the-food-you- eat/ Photo by Mark Wubben, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/novemberborn/3293983556/. CC-BY 2.0.

20 Here’s a demonstration video. Each piece of food has an RFID tag in its label, which is read by a reader embedded in the left arm of the scale. The right arm of the scale contains a weight sensor, which lets it detect the ‘environmental weight‘ of the trees placed on it. The scale itself is driven by an engine, which shows you the balance between the food on the left side, and the number of tries on the right. Project page and video: http://dkds.ciid.dk/py/tangible-user-interface/projects/meet-the- food-you-eat/ More info: http://lovelearn.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/meet-the-food-you-eat/

21 Here’s a very quick video of how the project evolved. Of course, not all tools in the video will be available to the average home, but it’s pretty awesome what three students put together! Video: http://lovelearn.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/prototyping-video/

PICNIC, Amsterdam 22 Here are some projects I was involved with. For the past two years, Mediamatic, a foundation from Amsterdam, has organized a hackers camp at the PICNIC conference. Photo by Michell Zappa, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/michellzappa/2887600242/. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Mediamatic Social RFID Hackers Camp 23 This is what a Hackers Camp looks like. Or, at least, the opening meeting. Last year we were about 30 people, and in 5 days we build 8 installations to be shown and used at the conference (or that was the plan, some projects went over time a bit). We used a bunch of laptops, RFID readers, various electronic things, and construction materials. Nothing ridiculously expensive, nor something that takes months to create. Photo by Daria Perevezentsev, http://www.mediamatic.net/page/52662/en. Licensed under Creative Commons, but it’s not clear which speciﬁc license.

== 24 Everybody attending the conference had the opportunity to create an online profile. They could also get an RFID tag (displayed left), which was then linked to this profile. This meant that each installation could identify the person interacting with it, provided it read the RFID tag. Photo by Daria Perevezentsev, http://www.mediamatic.net/page/52662/en. Licensed under Creative Commons, but it’s not clear which specific license. iktag image from http://www.mediamatic.net/page/51173/en.

Ralph Meijer Edwin Dertien Fabienne Serriere Mobile Massage Couch 25 A battery powered, couch on wheels, providing free massages. Both armrests have an RFID reader, on which you put your RFID tag to receive a massage. Other people can place their tag on the armrest to recharge your massage credit. And, for even more social interaction, if you use the couch with somebody else, you’re automatically connected on the online PICNIC network. What you need to build this? An old couch, car massage chairs, two RFID readers and a laptop. Perhaps a car battery and LED displays to show massage credit. Not very high tech, but pretty awesome! Mobile Massage Couch: http://www.mediamatic.net/page/52720/en. Photo by Daria Perevezentsev, http://www.mediamatic.net/page/54511/en. Licensed under Creative Commons, but it’s not clear which speciﬁc license.

Axel Roest Simon Claessen Mathias Forbach iKWiN 26 Google popularity contest! RFID tags are used to ﬁnd your proﬁle name, then a Google search is performed. The person with the highest number of search results, goes highest. Requirements: two small stage elevators (not exactly home made, but hey). Computer, two RFID readers, some mechanics and Arduino to control the elevators via computer. And the controls are nothing fancy: the Arduino drives an engine that pushes the up or down buttons. There’s an optical scanner trick that measures how high the elevator has gone so it stops in time. iKWiN: http://www.mediamatic.net/page/52953/en Photo by Mathias Forbach, http://www.mediamatic.net/page/54630/en. Agreement for use in this presentation with Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license granted via e- mail.

Erik Borra Mark Wubben Eelco Wagenaar Martijn Pannevis Adriaan Wormgoor Vbird 27 The awesomest installation was Vbird, but that’s only because I helped create it. Vbird is a bird that you throw to other people. Catch it, let it read your RFID tag, and throw it to somebody else. It says “Nice to meet you” when it reads your tag, and makes happy sounds when flying. Plus, it records its flight on video, and the video created after it read your tag is uploaded to your PICNIC profile. Unfortunately the hardware kept breaking, so in total we only played with it for about 15 minutes. That said, those were 15 very cool minutes. Requirements: large bird, Arduino with accelerometer and RFID reader, laptop for communicating with the bird and playing the sounds. Less easy to get: wireless camera and processing infrastructure. Vbird: http://www.mediamatic.net/page/52865/en Photo by Daria Perevezentsev, http://www.mediamatic.net/page/55874/en. Licensed under Creative Commons, but it’s not clear which specific license.

28 Videos from http://www.justlol.net/vbird/.

Peter Rukavina thebus.ca 29 Peter Rukavina, Canadian Reboot regular, has developed an online website for bus schedules in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. His phone service, consisting of an Asterisk VOIP server and a PHP application is now even advertised on the buses themselves! Source: http://ruk.ca/article/5332 Photo by Olle Jonsson, CC-BY-SA, http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/olleolleolle/875225915/.

thebus.ca 30 Peter Rukavina, Canadian Reboot regular, has developed an online website for bus schedules in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. His phone service, consisting of an Asterisk VOIP server and a PHP application is now even advertised on the buses themselves! Source: http://ruk.ca/article/5332 Photos copyright Peter Rukavina, CC-BY-NC-SA, http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/reinvented/ 3423352813/ and http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/reinvented/3424159978/.

Poke Baker Tweet 31 Baker Tweet is a small project by London-based creative company Poke. It is a little hardware interface that allows bakeries to easily send out tweets the moment a fresh treat comes out of the oven. More info: http://www.pokelondon.com/story/project-launch/mmmm-doughnuts-arduino- style-/ and: http://www.bakertweet.com/

Baker Tweet 32 Internally, it uses an Arduino Duemilanove, an Arduino Ethernet Shield, hooked up to a wireless adapter. Also an LED display and some other parts. Photo copyright Poke, all rights reserved. Used with permission. http://www.ﬂickr.com/ photos/aszolty/3386553595/.

33 Video: http://vimeo.com/3972081.

34 Now for a few projects that scare me a bit… Photo by Gian Luca, CC-BY-SA. http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/u_ju/2344358708/.

35 Copenhagen is starting an experiment to equip 5000 bikes with RFID chips. About 18,000 bikes get stolen each year in Copenhagen, but are mostly left somewhere else, where they use up space. By equipping bikes with RFID tags, it becomes possible to identify your bike by simply scanning for it. When your bike is stolen, simply go to a website and mark it as such, and when civil servants scan your RFID tag, you’ll receive an e-mail with a map of where your bike should be. A pretty awesome way of being able to ﬁnd your bike again, and you’ll see in the video how many people lined up to get an RFID tag. On the other hand, I wonder if the municipality knows which tag belongs to which person, can they start using this to enforce traffic laws? Track bikes through town? Source: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/06/chips-are-up-in-copenhagen.html Video: http://vimeo.com/5091211

Marc Boon RFID Sniffer 36 The RFID Sniffer is a little portable device that can detect RFID tags (or at least the 13.56 MHz ones). It’s made by Marc Boon, and you can buy a DIY kit for € 15, or a fully made one for € 40. More: http://rﬁd.marcboon.com Photo by Marc Boon, CC-BY-NC-SA, http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/marcboon/3622112056/.

Getting Started 37 Awesome. eh? So, how can you go do this yourself? Photo by Eneas De Troya, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/eneas/2777321002/. CC-BY 2.0.

arduino.cc 38 I’ve mentioned the Arduino several times. It’s a cool module which lets you program digital and analog in- and outputs. You can upload a software program to the Arduino board, so it runs stand-alone from your computer. It can also talk to your computer. The design of the Arduino is open source, which is a really cool approach. Because of this, there are various variants of the official Arduino. The basic Arduino kit is about € 25. Photo by equinoxefr, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/equinoxefr/2775908354/. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

violet.net 39 If you don’t want to hack hardware, you can also get consumer level devices that let you easily do things with software. Violet is a French company that sells an RFID reader called Mir:ror, as well as the Nabaztag. The Mir:ror allows you to launch applications on your own computer, and do calls to web servers. This latter is really cool, because it makes it very easy to program web responses to a tag being read in your room. The Nabaztag is a rabbit connected directly to the internet via Wi-Fi. It participates in Violet’s social network, so you can add friends, get news updates and so on. It has an RFID reader so you can trigger actions, just like the Mir:ror. You can hack the Nabaztag so it doesn’t point at Violet’s servers but your own. This allows you to circumvent Violet’s social network, which, to be frank, kind of sucks. A Nabaztag costs € 145. A Mir:ror is € 49. See http://violet.net. Photo by Jeremy Keith, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/adactio/560089850/. CC-BY 2.0.

touchatag.com 40 Touchatag (formerly Tikitag) is similar to Violet’s Mir:ror. It launches actions on your own computer. That said, its design isn’t as fancy as Violet’s, and the reader doesn’t give feedback when it reads a tag. I think that, fundamentally, Touchatag is an engineering company, whereas Violet has more design sensibilities (in fact, Touchatag is an Alcatel-Lucent venture). This is reﬂected in the devices themselves. You can set up server interactions with Touchatag, but it’s a very complicated engineering process rather than a simple server call. The Mir:ror is also prettier, it beeps and blinks. It also reads more RFID tags than Touchatag. During PICNIC, we’ve successfully used the Touchatag readers to drive several projects, although we circumvented the required Touchatag software and interacted with the reader directly. The Touchatag costs € 30. Photo by Mark Wubben, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/novemberborn/2958316938/. CC-BY 2.0.

Roomware Processing … Software 41 In terms of software, most hardware has Java libraries available. Therefore, programming in Java may be a good option. Python is also a good choice. Roomware is an open-source framework for creating interactive spaces. It’s based on Java. Processing is again a Java-based tool, mostly for visual processing. Arduino uses it as well to control the hardware. And, of course, there are many other tools available, and you can always roll your own! Photo by Windell Oskay, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/oskay/768600012/. CC-BY-2.0.

42 Now, as Matt Jones would put it, GET EXCITED and MAKE THINGS! Illustration by Matt Jones, CC-BY-SA-NC, http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/ 3365682994/.

11born.net/reboot11 supercollider.dk / @novemberborn 43 Thank you.

Special Thanks Adam Little Andrew Zolty Eilidh Dickson Daria Perevezentsev Mathias Forbach Mediamatic Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design 44 Special thanks to the following people, who provided material for this talk: Brian Suda: http://suda.co.uk Adam Little: http://www.localhiddenvariable.com Eilidh Dickson: http://www.eilidhdickson.co.uk Daria Perevezentsev: http://www.mediamatic.net/person/51156 Poke: http://www.pokelondon.com/ Mediamatic: http://mediamatic.net CIID: http://ciid.dk Photo by Lali Masriera, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/visualpanic/183356975/. CC-BY 2.0.

Lali Masriera Michell Zappa Bryan Thatcher Olle Jonsson Fabio Bruna Peter Rukavina Tobias Toft Gian Luca Fabrizio Sciami Eneas De Troya Jeff Keyzer equinoxefr Dan Foy Jeremy Keith myuibe Windell Oskay Nathan Borror Matt Jones David Goehring Jeff Kubina John Goodridge 45 And of course many, many thanks to the wonderful people on Flickr who licensed their photos under Creative Commons. Photo by Jeff Kubina, http://ﬂickr.com/photos/kubina/903033693/. CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Homemade Ubicomp at Reboot 11

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