A novel interaction metaphor for personal environment control: direct manipulation of physical environment based on 3D visualization

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence is the vision of a world, in which we are surrounded by smart devices that help us to organize and master our everyday life. Hitherto, it is the user's responsibility to manage his personal environment. In such a world, the question will be how the user will interact with his environment and devices integrated there. Existing environment controller solutions do not intuitively support the user by accessing the infrastructures and services of his environment. Often the user must know special device IDs, IP numbers or unique device paths to be able to access a specific one device among a number of available devices. This is specially difficult, if the user is in a complex environment for the first time and he has to concern on his current task. The Personal Environment Controller provides an intuitive and novel interaction metaphor which tightly integrates the user, his media and physical environment. It integrates the virtual world and its objects (i.e., files) with the physical world and its devices by providing an integrated user interface (UI) and allowing the user for directly manipulate these two worlds. The UI is based on a 3D visualization of the environment, which makes a direct link between the physical objects and their 3D representations within the appliance. This allows the user to easily identify a device that he wants to control based on its location, form and orientation in the 3D Model which correspond to them of the physical world. The user can with only one drag&drop operation move his presentation from his notebook to the beamer and get it started there. By doing so, we are extending the well known and accepted interaction paradigm of direct manipulation from the virtual computer world to the physical real world.