Proxemic Environments Modelling based on a Graphical Domain-Specific Language
Paulo Octavio Gutiérrez Pérez, Philippe Roose, Yudith Cardinale, Marc Dalmau, Dominique Masson, Nadine Couture · 2020
Smart environments are currently overpowering traditional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) approaches for people's everyday life applications. Proxemic interaction is an emerging area for improving HCI experiences in such environments, causing the so-called proxemic environments to emerge. Proxemic interaction describes how the five dimensions (i.e., Distance, Identity, Location, Movement, and Orientation - DILMO) can be used to define interactions among people and digital devices. Current studies in this area are focused on developing proxemic applications with specific functionalities, based on a toolkit that allows developers to obtain DILMO information from sensors. However, there exists a notable lack of general approaches able to support the whole implementation process, starting from the modelling of proxemic environments to represent general proxemics behaviours, and finalizing with the development of specific applications. In order to facilitate the integration of proxemic capabilities in HCI, we propose an approach for modelling proxemic environments based on a graphical Domain-Specific Language (DSL). The DSL allows non-specialist designers to express proxemic interactions for modelling proxemic environments and supports the development process. In order to show its suitability and functionality, we have implemented a prototype to design proxemic behaviours in different proxemic environments.