We describe the motivation, design and initial implementation of the Equip Component Toolkit (ECT), a software toolkit for ubiquitous computing that is intended to reduce the cost – especially in time and effort – of developing ubicomp installations, applications and environments, and increase the potential involvement of designers and users in this process. The toolkit supports distributed applications running over multiple hosts by the creation, configuration and interconnection of software components (especially existing/legacy components) and components which represent physical devices and sensors. Users are supported by graphical tools which provide various representations of the running environment, plus facilities for monitoring, (re)configuration, scripting and learning by example.

We describe Uncle Roy All Around You, a mixture of game and theatre that took place in central London in late May and early June of 2003. Street players, equipped with handheld computers and wireless networking, journeyed through the streets of the city in search of an elusive character called Uncle Roy, while online players journeyed through a parallel 3D model of the city, were able to track their progress and could communicate with them in order to help or hinder them. We describe how Uncle Roy All Around You mixed elements of preprogrammed game content with live performance and behind the scenes orchestration to create a compelling experience, especially for street players. We suggest that finding ways to scale this approach to support larger numbers of participants is an important challenge for future research.