Abstract

Smart homes are ubicomp applications that are gaining traction in today’s economy because of rapid technological advancements. Today, there are home products being developed commercially that create our environment smarter, most of these are voice assistant speakers, smart thermostat, security devices and more. The interfaces of such systems available today consists mostly of speech interface or a graphical user interface (GUI) (on an embedded system or through a mobile application). Augmented reality (AR) on the other hand, is mostly used out of the smart home context primarily being used for entertainment purpose. This research looks into the potential of AR interfaces for smart home by evaluating a small smart home ubicomp application that makes use of a fully functional mobile application which provides AR interfaces for individual smart home components. It also compares other interaction methods such as speech, gesture, GUI and tangible user interface (TUI) in the same context. The results acquired tell us why other interaction methods such as GUI and TUI work so well in today’s society and it’s because they are effective and efficient unlike other methods. The work done in this research looks into other interaction methods to see how these methods satisfy the ubicomp application in some critical areas. Speech and gesture interaction methods are found to be proactive interaction methods in this project (i.e. interaction must be initiated by user) which fails the purpose of calm computing. Mobile AR interface is found to be a balanced approached towards such ubicomp applications, and is explored in detail.

Downloads

Dissertation and poster

Project files are maintained on github

Contacts

Mail me any questions and/or suggestions on bsb32@hw.ac.uk