Smart Device - Form Factors

Form Factors

Mark Weiser proposed three basic forms for ubiquitous system devices: tabs, pads and boards.

• Tabs: accompanied or wearable centimetre sized devices, e.g., smartphones, smart cards
• Pads: hand-held decimetre-sized devices, e.g., laptops
• Boards: meter sized interactive display devices, e.g., horizontal surface computers and vertical smart boards.

These three forms proposed by Weiser are characterised by being macro-sized, having a planar form and by incorporating visual output displays. These were also envisaged more as information appliances. If we relax each of these three characteristics we can expand this range into a much more diverse and potentially more useful range of Ubiquitous Computing devices. Hence, three additional forms for ubiquitous systems have been proposed:.

• Dust: miniaturised devices without direct HCI interfaces, e.g., Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), ranging from nanometres through micrometers to millimetres. See also Smart dust.
• Skin: fabrics based upon light emitting and conductive polymers and organic computer devices. These can be formed into more flexible non-planar display surfaces and products such as clothes and curtains, see OLED display. MEMS devices can also be painted onto various surfaces so that a variety of physical world structures can act as networked surfaces of MEMS.
• Clay: ensembles of MEMS can be formed into arbitrary three dimensional shapes, as artefacts resembling different kinds of physical object. See also Tangible interface.