Restriction, Modification and Extension of Consumer Devices for Prototyping Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In this paper, we report on several work-in-progress projects of our research group and other systems that exploit commercially available off-the-shelf components for deriving research prototypes and systems in the field of ubiquitous computing. We discuss the benefits of restricting, modifying and extending the built-in functionality of these systems to ease the development process. Using the approach presented reduces the amount of low level knowledge, of e.g. electrical engineering, to achieve the actual goal of building new appliances and ubiquitous computing systems. The approach presented empowers researchers from many domains to build prototypes that can be experienced by users. We present an example of an extended commercial product, the Nokia 770 tablet PC.