User interfaces for smart things -- A generative approach with semantic interaction descriptions

  • Authors:
  • Simon Mayer;Andreas Tschofen;Anind K. Dey;Friedemann Mattern

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland;Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

With ever more everyday objects becoming “smart” due to embedded processors and communication capabilities, the provisioning of intuitive user interfaces to control smart things is quickly gaining importance. We present a model-based interface description scheme that enables automatic, modality-independent user interface generation. User interface description languages based on our approach carry enough information to suggest intuitive interfaces while still being easily producible for developers. This is enabled by describing the atomic interactive components of a device and capturing the semantics of interactions with the device. We propose a taxonomy of abstract sensing and actuation primitives and present a smartphone application that can act as a ubiquitous device controller. An evaluation of the mobile application in a laboratory setup, home environments, and an educational setting as well as the results of a user study highlight the accessibility of the proposed scheme for application developers and its suitability for controlling smart devices.