Ad Hoc Pairings: Semantic Relationships and Mobile Devices
Jason O'Neill Germany · Proceedings of DRS · 2016
As the digital world continues to become more mobile and wireless, a new challenge has arisen in this always connected landscape. That challenge has been created by the very thing that has helped to enable this nomadic experience – the loss of wires has resulted in a loss of what was once visually mapped connections between two or more digital objects which helped to semantically defined the relationship between ad hoc devices as well as user and devices. Current applications require the use of screen-based (explicit) interfaces to manage these connections but this research explores opportunities to leverage more implicit and tangible methods to creating these connections. This research and resulting user study (N=12) explored the use of gestures between primitive forms as a means of encoding paired relationships. The analysis of the resulting 108 patterns generated helped to isolate pairing attributes and an encoding protocol that could inform current and future tangible connections between digital devices.