Supporting the construction of real world interfaces

In recent years, real world objects have been used to reflect information previously shown on the computer screen. While most earlier efforts have required significant developer knowledge and skills to construct and program the displays, our work is investigating methods to enable programmers to use real world objects in much the same way that they would typical user interface widgets. This paper outlines programming interfaces developed on top of the X10 protocol for controlling power flow to electrical devices, including sample programs for each.