Chapter 5. Managing Interactions with Physical Components

Electronic devices have changed our life. We are surrounded by quite a few invisible objects that collect and eventually compute environment data. Like we saw in the previous chapter, these devices use sensors to retrieve information and we can find them in our everyday life, for example, in our car, when we're walking through supermarkets' sliding doors, and maybe when we're coming back to home.

We can inspire ourselves looking at these things and build amazing physical applications that are capable of reacting to the environment and, indirectly, to the people around. However, if our project expects a direct human interaction, we may need to manage this interaction with physical components.

The goal of this chapter is to build a web radio that uses built-in Android APIs to manage Internet streams, while all interactions are managed by physical components, such as in the old fashioned radios.

In this chapter...