Attentive objects: enriching people's natural interaction with everyday objects

ate a place where people may playfully meet and interact with digital materials. Visitors may post and reply to questions displayed on the floor and they interact with the contents of the floor through pulling a cursor with their bodies. Thus navigating the cursor to a certain point involves collaboration and negotiation among visitors of the library. Thus the concern for integrating physical and digital space as we strive for in Center for Interactive Spaces implies: • having architects and engineers as part of our research team • focusing on social interaction amongst co-located people • moving interaction from the level of objects to the level of space-plan • establishing new means and ideals for human computer interaction The New HCI. According to Aarts [1], ambient intelligence environments are characterized by their ubiq-uity, transparency, and intelligence. At the Center for Interactive Spaces we take a different approach to defining interaction ideals of the new type of environments we shape. Rather than designing transparent and efficient interaction, we focus on designing aesthetics of interaction, which implies a focus on how the means of interaction can be surprising, engaging, and serve to establish a new relationship to the materials people interact with. For example, we have designed a gesture-based remote control that allows people to use their bodies, rather than just the tip of their thumb, to interact with their digital materials. Moreover, interacting with the interactive floor at the library can best be achieved if more than one person is present. The means of interacting with the floor are not directly perceivable but visitors have to play around with the floor in order to explore the means of interaction. Thus at the Center for Interactive Spaces we seek to investigate how to design playful and engaging interaction rather than efficient and transparent interaction. We see a danger in that people may lose their sense of control in environments where they are seamlessly tracked and profiled. Thus, instead of striving for technology to become invisibly embedded in our environments, we seek to make technology visible and remarkable [4]. After all, we want to exploit that the most intelligent in our environments remain the people who inhabit the spaces. (2004) Help me pull that cursor—A Collaborative Interactive Floor Enhancing Community Interaction. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research pre