Passage: Physical transportation of digital information in cooperative buildings

Abstract

The Passage mechanism introduced in this paper provides an easy and intuitive way to transport various types of digital objects by using also normal physical objects without any special identification tags. The current implementation of the Passage mechanism utilizes electronic scales and contact-free identification devices and thus allows for identification of arbitrary physical objects as well as immediate and unique identification of certain dedicated physical objects. The mechanism is used in various types of cooperative work scenarios in the i-LAND environment (Streitz, et al. 1999) that provides an essential part of the infrastructure for cooperative buildings.