Ubiquitous Computing in a Home Environment, Controlling Consumer Electronics
Lars Thern, Tarik Hadzovic · Lund University Publications Student Papers (Lund University) · 2014
Building interaction prototypes for ubiquitous computing is inherently difficult, since it involves a number of different devices and systems. Prototyping is an important step in developing and evaluating interaction concepts. The ideal prototyping methodology should offer high fidelity at a relatively low cost. This thesis describes the development of interaction concepts for controlling consumer electronics in a ubiquitous computing home environment, as well as the setup, based on immersive virtual reality, used to develop and evaluate the interaction concepts. Off-the-shelf input/output devices and a game engine are used for developing two concepts for device discovery and two concepts for device interaction. The interaction concepts are compared in a controlled experiment in order to evaluate the concepts as well as the virtual reality setup. Statistically significant differences and subjective preferences could be observed in the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. Overall, the results suggest that the interaction concepts could be acceptable to some users for some use cases and that the virtual reality setup offers the possibility to quickly build interaction concepts which can be evaluated and compared in a controlled experiment.