some cool ubicomp apps

Pattie Maes gave a keynote talk at OOPSLA last week and she summarized a few of the cool projects going on in the Ambient Intelligence Group at MIT. The Relational Pillow (aka Pillow Talk) is so incredibly cute that I couldn’t help but write about it. Imagine being far away from your significant other and being able to send tactile messages to each other using a cute little pillow as the medium. I love it.

Quickies is a really cool way to integrate well-known physical artifacts (sticky notes) with digital applications. You can write notes that automatically add scheduled appointments to your digital calendar and send yourself reminders via SMS messages. All of your notes are digitized and you can search them on your computer. You can even add RFID tags to the Quickies to tag items and find out where they are later! What I love about this application is that it isn’t designed to replace physical artifacts that are so easy and natural to use; it simply augments an existing physical artifact with cool new digital features.