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Conclusions and Future work

The working principle of IRREAL has been filed for Patent and we intend to further develop the system's infrastructure. Currently every sender is fed by a serial cable from the next available workstation with a free serial port. In environments other than a computer science building or a rather overlookable exhibition booth this installation can become somewhat cumbersome. We are therefore working on a radio link to each sender. Also power consumption of the current transmitter hardware is relatively high, so that each sender requires a power outlet close to it. For situations such as temporary exhibits or conferences a battery solution nevertheless seems feasible, effectively turning the broadcast transmitters into self-contained units roughly the size of a small smoke detector. User feedback has been very positive so far, especially because of the fact that everybody can use their own device to use the service. People found that the invisible information they could collect with their Palm Pilots had some effective value for them. This might, of course, be biased by the inherent play instinct of Palm Pilot users, but it shows that by scaling down the technological requirements radically, certain forms of augmenting the space around us with information can actually be of use for a considerable number of real life users.


next up previous
Next: Acknowledgments Up: Augmenting Buildings with Infrared Previous: Currently implemented services

Andreas Butz
Fri Sep 22 09:15:51 MEST 2000