Sensing atoms and bits

Coulton, Paul (2017) Sensing atoms and bits. In: Sensory arts and design. Bloomsbury, London. ISBN 9781474280198

Abstract

It was Milgram, Takemura, Utsumi, and Kishino who introduced the Virtuality Continuum in 1995 and highlighted that the distinction between real and virtual was increasingly not a hard boundary but one in which both the real and the virtual coexisted. However, in the intervening years our experience of this continuum has increasingly taken place through flat glass screens that primarily addresses our senses of sight and touch. With the emergence of the so called Internet of Things as a global infrastructure of networked physical objects, or ‘things’, that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable, and/or controllable via the Internet, designers will be able to consider interactions that can encompass all of our senses relating to the real and the virtual aspects of these objects as they are constructed from both ‘Atoms and Bits’.