Tangible and Embedded Interaction

From toys to collaborative work, boardgames to augmented surfaces, the conference TEI 2009 that takes place now in Cambridge UK presents all the latest trends in the domain of tangible interfaces and physical computing. Tom Igoe gave a great keynote this morning about the importance of DownCycling and reusing existing electronic devices with new purposes, like the REWARE project of Hans Christoph Steiner at Eyebeam in Nyc. He talked as well of the PlantR project that uses cellphones to probes soils in order to know what kind of plants can grow at your home, a mobile phone version of EasyBloom.