Response to Proximity Toolkit and ViconFace

The Proximity Toolkit and ViconFace paper (CHI 2010) proposes a high-level API to abstract the underlying configuration of a Vicon system. Physical objects are affixed with digital markers for tracking and they are catalogued in a developer’s mode, following a traditional paradigm of develop and run states of imperative software applications. In the run state of an application, relationships between these objects and their relationships are defined in an initialization phase. Events are raised when the relationship rules are found following a GUI-based event-driven paradigm. Removing some of the design constraints will increase the capabilities of the toolkit. For example, in the run state, the system could access lower-level information about digital markers in the environment to detect unknown objects and create new relationships. Another possibility to extend the toolkit's utility is to support polling-based interaction in addition to the event-driven model, which would be useful for having a continuous proximity zone that I alluded to in another blog posting.