Building intelligent environments with Smart-Its

Smart-Its are self-contained, stick-on computers that attach to everyday objects. These augmented objects become soft media, enabling dynamic digital relationships with users and each other. In the Smart-Its project, we are developing technology to realize a vision of computation everywhere, where computer technology seamlessly integrates into everyday life, supporting users in their daily tasks. By embedding sensors, computation, and communication into common artifacts, future computing applications can adapt to human users rather than the other way around. However, it's currently difficult to develop this type of ubiquitous computing because of the lack of toolkits integrating both the required hardware and software. Therefore, we are creating a class of small computers - called Smart-Its - equipped with wireless communication and sensors to make it possible to create smart artifacts with little overhead.