[其它] Ambient Wall: Smart Wall Display Interface which can be controlled bySimple Gest

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发表于 2012-1-4 16:47:40 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

Abstract

The residential environment is getting smarter, and home appliances have become connected each other automatically. Accordingly, user interface also has become increasingly complicated. In this paper, we found the main causes of making the users uncomfortable at home by task analysis, and then suggest a new interactive system suitable to the smart home. Ambient Wall interface enables users to monitor what’s happening in their house at a glance, and control their surroundings by simple gesture without any physical interface device.

Keywords: Ambient Intelligence, Wall Display, Gesture Interface

1. Introduction

These days, we use various kinds of electronic appliances such as TV, washing machine, PC, air conditioner, and refrigerator at home. These devices make our living more convenient. However, a lot of people are still suffering from the household chores and often have trouble using the devices, since they provide very complex user interfaces. The rapid development of modern home appliance creates another difficult housework to users; even though these new devices have more functions and make synergies by connected each other. By reducing the inconvenient housework, the users want to spend enjoyable and meaningful time during their leisure time with their family members.

To understand user’s lives and what users exactly want to improve, we did the user observation and interviewed them. We could figure out the requirements and inconvenient items about electronic devices. There are too many electronic devices at home and needed to respond each of them. There are also several similar controllers which make their users confused. The users waste time searching them. Additionally, there are some situations that users cannot recognize the alarms of the devices like washing machine and microwave, so they may redo the same task. In general, they don’t care about where mobile devices are at home, so they sometimes missed the important messages.

Figure 1. Ambient Wall Interface Concept

Smart home environments have been discussed and promoted for many years now. With the progress of wired and wireless home networking based on ubiquitous computing, smart home projects have started at every corner of the world [Harper 2003]. In order to bring the technology and application available for everyone, the main issue today is how to interact with the system. To solve this problem, three typical UIs–a PC, a media terminal, and a mobile phone-for home control system have been suggested and evaluated [Koskela and Vaananen-Vainio-Mattila 2004]. Recently, the studies using more easy-to-use interfaces were reported. GeeAir [Pan et el. 2010] is a universal multimodal remote controller for home appliances, and Seifried et al. [2009] developed a touch-sensitive interactive system, called Cristal, that enabled users to control the devices on a table surface. Nevertheless, these physical interfaces make the users unfamiliar or uncomfortable as seen in the result of our task analysis. In this paper, we concentrate on designing an interface solution which the users can access the system anywhere and at any time.

2. Ambient Wall Interface

Ambient Wall is a new interface system for smart home that can display the current situation on the wall, and also control the surroundings without the additional control devices such as TV remote controller. Users can monitor what they want to see easily wherever and whenever on the big wall screen.

This system is composed of two parts as shown as Figure 1. The first one is the Smart Wall Display part, which shows the users the current situation of home by monitoring electronic appliances. The second one is the Hand Gesture Control part. It detects the user’s hand gestures, and enables them to manage the displayed elements that are possible to control.

2.1 Smart Wall Display

To display on the wall, a projection device is needed. This device projects context-aware information onto the blank area of the wall. The displayed information is located in the conspicuous place for users to see it easily. The ceiling or the front wall in the living room is the best place for it, because users generally spend most of their time on the couch at home. Each component appears only when the users need them. Indeed, the components, which can be controlled, are showed in a different way to distinguish them from the others which simply show for alarms.

2.2 Hand Gesture Control

Ambient Wall is controlled by hand gestures, so users don’t need to spend their valuable time to search controllers anymore. However, the gesture for Ambient Wall has to be separated from others, since the users may use their hands for common expression. It can be easily distinguished because the users don’t normally point out the area of the blank ceiling and wall. To recognize the user’s gesture, there are some high performance solutions for commercial purposes, such as Microsoft kinect.