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Bettina Conradi, Balázs Serényi, Miriam Kranz, Heinrich Hussmann
SourceBinder: Community-based Visual and Physical Prototyping
Workshop on Open Design Spaces (in Conjunction with DIS 2010). Aarhus, Denmark, August 2010. To appear in the International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI), 2010. ISSN 1861-4280

Physical interfaces broaden the entrance into the virtual world through sensors and actuators in our surrounding. Prototyping these interfaces demands expertise in hardware and software development skills that are rarely found in end users, hobbyists or designers. If those users want to build a rapid prototype for a quick exploration of an idea, they are often troubled with learning the necessary programming and hardware engineering skills. The entry barriers for these target users can be lowered by providing suitable hardware and software toolkits. SourceBinder is a web-based visual programming tool that enables users to create projects and share them in a community. Users can test and adapt existing projects and even become developers by creating new nodes that can be used by the community. We want to present our extensions of SourceBinder which enables hardware to be connected to the visual programming environment, and show some example projects that can be realized in such a setting.