Now is the plan to add some more advanced tangibles. The new tangibles should have different areas where they sense touch and depending on where they are touched, they should effect different parameters(here i made a small wired potentiometer prototype: CapSense w. Arduino - Capacitive Sensing - YouTube).
However the final tangibles should be wireless, so now is the question which wireless method to use? I'm fairly new to electronics/arduino and totally new to wireless connections, but I read a bit today and I think a good solution would be to have a Teensy + XBee in every tangible and connect them via WiFi to the computer (something like this: XBee Arduino Library, for Teensy).
Can somebody who know a little more about wireless connections confirm this "guess"?
I also found the panStamp (http://www.panstamp.com/products/wirelessarduino), which would be very nice, because i wouldn't need an additional arduino/teensy in the tangible. But I can't find much information about it, if I can connect several transmitter to one receiver.
It would be really nice if somebody could point me in the "right direction".
I can confirm that multiple panStamps can communicate between them and also to a common receiver. panStamp follows a point-to-point and point-to-multipoint schema. Moreover, there is Lagarto, an open source automation platform which lets us do many things from the IP world, including sending data to multiple clouding data services (Cosm, ThingSpeak, sen.se), integration with OpenRemote, event management, web GUI, etc.
thank you very much for your reply. It's good to know that the panStamps can communicate between each other and I think it's a very interesting device which I'll keep in mind for future projects or maybe this project at a later point.
But after I read that the XBee can be used without an additional microcontroller to send "raw" data, I think I'll go for the XBee for now. As I'm totally new to wireless networks, I started to read the book "Building Wireless Sensor Networks" which explains how to use the XBee step by step. That's what I need for now and I couldn't find such step by step tutorials for the panStamps.
But like I said, after I have used the "easy" XBees and have a better understanding of wireless networks, maybe I can switch to something more advanced. But thanks for the advice and also the link to the wiki.