I created the UbiKit for my teaching. Its main components are a screen in a wooden casing named the UbisScreen and the UbiUbi, which can be connected to the screen via USB. UbiScreen and UbiUbi together form the UbiKit (UbiScreen + UbiUbi = UbiKit).

The UbiUbi is an enhanced clone of the MakeyMakey, i.e., it is a keyboard and mouse emulator that can turn conductive materials into human input devices. To this end, various connector-ports on the UbiUbi allow connecting switches and keys by using alligator clips. For instance, a button made of Play-Doh could be connected to the ‘left-click’ port and a banana could be connected to the letter ‘a’ port (and so on). Touching the Play-Doh button would then result in a ‘mouse-clicked’ event and biting into the banana would type the letter ‘a’. This again, could trigger the display of different screen mock-ups on the wooden box. In summary, the UbiKit depicts a set of devices and tools to be taken home by the students and to be transformed into a rapidly developed tangible prototype. Here, The main focus is on screen-based interactions and on prototyping innovative and often playful interfaces for user input. UbiKit was made for early design explorations and removes heavy engineering or coding from the process.

Videos of Student Prototypes using UbiUbi

Credits: videos made by Marc Kroll, Johannes Dostal, Monika Meczkowski and Konstantin Zilberburg, Hana Salihodzic, Felix Hochgruber

Reference

• Güldenpfennig, F., Nunes, F., Subasi, Ö., & Urbanek, M. (2017). UbiKit: Learning to Prototype for Tangible and Ubiquitous Computing. Paper presented at the British HCI. ACM. PDF.

Some Images of the UbiKit including UbiUbi

The lo-fi prototypes in the figures using UbiKit/UbiUbi were created by students of Vienna University of Technology.