The authors describe a family of personal active badges developed for location of people and devices in the computer environment. Applications include location and paging of individuals as well as control of computer systems. Active badges are one type of a range of portable computers connected to cordless communication systems that can now be made. Because of their small size and application such devices are referred to as personal interactive computing objects. A speculative discussion of how such devices may be used in the traditional computing environment is given.< >