From Pixels to Plastic
Video: Availabot
This is a project of ours called Availabot. I don’t want to talk in depth about it today, but I still want to show you this prototype.
This particular one looks like a friend of ours, Matt Jones.
It’s a puppet you plug into your computer, with USB, and it represents one of your friends on instant messaging. When the person goes offline, it falls over. As they come online, it stands up.
It’s definitely more about enriching an experience than achieving a task.
Most of my favourite points about it come simple from it being a physical thing. You can glance into a room and see whether somebody you really care about is online, without touching the computer. You can hide it behind the monitor if you’re working really hard, and it’s much easier to ignore. You can display, to people around you, who you really care about, cementing the bonds of friendship in normal, social ways.
These are all things that I’ve designed for for years in the social software world, on the Web, and you get them for free with physical objects.
So, from a design perspective, tangible interactions and physical computing are definitely to be desired.
it’s really unique, this physical computing thing. Unlike other technological shifts, it makes things simpler so the market is bigger.