John N. A. Brown

Aspekte der Human Computer Interaction im Smart Home

Das Smart Home mit all seinen Möglichkeiten und Funktionen hat sich im privaten Wohnumfeld bisher nicht durchgesetzt. Die Gründe dafür sind vielschichtig, Aspekte der Human Computer Interaction (HCI) spielen dabei aber eine entscheidende Rolle. Anhand des aktuellen Leitkonzepts der HCI, User Experience, analysiert der Beitrag Bedieneigenschaften und psychologische Faktoren der Nutzer ebenso wie nicht funktionale Faktoren des Systems. Die Vorstellung von Beispielprojekten soll aufzeigen, dass ein erweiterter, HCI-orientierter Zugang einen Schlüsselfaktor für den zukünftigen Erfolg des Konzepts Smart Home darstellen kann.

“…Language in Their Very Gesture” First Steps towards Calm Smart Home Input

Weiser and Brown made it clear when they predicted the advent of ubiquitous computing: the most important and challenging aspect of developing the all-encompassing technology of the early 21st Century is the need for computers that can accept and produce information in a manner based on the natural human ways of communicating. In our first steps towards a new paradigm for calm interaction, we propose a multimodal trigger for getting the attention of a passive smart home system, and we implement a gesture recognition application on a smart phone to demonstrate three key concepts: 1) the possibility that a common gesture of human communication could be used as part of that trigger, and; 2) that some commonly understood gestures exist and can be used immediately, and; 3) that the message communicated to the system can be extracted from secondary features of a deliberate human action. Demonstrating the concept, but not the final hardware or mounting strategy, 16 individuals performed a double clap with a smart phone mounted on their upper arm. The gesture was successfully recognized in 88% of our trials. Furthermore, when asked to try and deceive the system by performing any other action that might be similar, 75% of the participants were unable to register a false positive.

“Just the Place for a Snark!”: An Introduction to Calm Technology

What is the difference between how information is presented in nature and on computers? According to Professor Mark Weiser, the core difference is the ease with which the new information can move from the focus to the periphery of our attention. Technology designed with this in mind allows the user to easily move in and out of a state of flow, working at peak performance while avoiding techno-stress. That is what Weiser called Calm Technology.

“Yet, Still, Ever After…”: Future Work

This book has been about the theoretical and practical work that went into developing a truly intuitive interface for controlling networked and embedded devices in the smart homes within and in parallel to the Casa Vecchia project. Both branches of that work continue, inside and outside of the Casa Vecchia system. In this final chapter we provide an overview of the theoretical and practical efforts that have derived from Casa Vecchia and from our work on the S.N.A.R.K.; and look into the future at what will come next.

“How Do You Feel?”: Qualitative Results

The C.A.S.A. T.E.V.A. system was not designed solely to perform tasks with measurable success. The core intent was to design a new experimental means of interaction with a complex network of embedded devices that would not feel new, experimental, or complex. In this chapter we present the qualitative methods used to capture the feelings and opinions of the participants in our endeavor regarding the system. We used standard, pre- and post-experimental Likert questionnaires to gather consciously-expressed opinions, a System Usability Scale to turn some of those opinions into a deeper comparative evaluation of the system, and anthropological methods to gather unconscious opinions.

“What I Tell You Three Times Is True”: The S.N.A.R.K. Circuit

So-called natural interaction with smart homes has been limited by a misunderstanding of how humans naturally interact. Consider speech. Chatbots, developed to push the limits of voice-based interaction ignore the fact that natural human speech is actually multi-modal, supplemented both consciously and unconsciously by posture, gesture, facial expression, and a complex web of flexible situational data. In terms of UX design, this is not a bug but a feature. The inability of voice-based systems to recognize spoken commands can be corrected by using additional natural signals such as gestures, to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. This form of modular redundancy was fundamental to early satellite communications and became the basis for our S.N.A.R.K. Circuit, the means by which a human with the correct mental model can interact intuitively with a Smart Home.

“How Do You Do?”: Quantitative Results

Our multimodal interaction is based on a smartphone app that combines GUI, text, gestures and voice commands as a step towards intuitive human communication with a smart home. Shown how to perform two tasks, 32 participants were asked to intuit how to perform seven other tasks using networked and embedded devices through intuitive multimodal interaction based on universal mental models. 1st attempts were between 28.1 and 90.6% successful. By the third consecutive attempt, successes ranged from 65.6% on one device, to 100% on four others.

“The Method Employed I Would Gladly Explain…”: Set up, Location and Protocol

In order to test the C.A.S.A. T.E.V.A. concept in the Casa Vecchia setting without disrupting the lives of the families living in our smart homes, we brought 38 international participants into a functional smart home lab based on the campus of the Alpen-Adria Universitat Klagenfurt, in southern Austria. They were introduced to the system and asked to perform a series of tasks using some of the networked and embedded devices common to the Casa Vecchia homes. This chapter describes, in detail, the experimental setting and the test protocol.

“Do All that You Know, and Try All that You Don’t…”: Models of Intuitive Interaction

Humans perceive the world not as it is, but as we imagine it. Specifically, we do not process what we perceive in real time. Instead we make irregular updates to a mental model of the world around us, and it is that mental model with which we interact. In order to interact successfully with any environment, we need to have a functional mental model. We created two mental models for use with our S.N.A.R.K. Circuit, mental models that would relieve the user from having to understand complicated details about the interaction. This moved the process to their unconscious and made it more intuitive. The original goal of this project was to induce in the user a mental model of the home as a single entity, by enabling multi-modal interaction and easy transfer between modalities and devices. In order to achieve intuitiveness, we moved the goalposts. Giving voice commands to an invisible major domo, or waving your smart phone like a wand do not reflect normal life, but do reflect interactions that are already well-accepted enough to be intuitive.

“…A Lesson in Natural History”: Introduction to the Smart Home

Human evolution is intertwined with technology evolution, from wooden tools to computers. In the 1990s Weiser announces ubiquitous computing, and called for an re-imagining of computerized systems, making them “calm”. This chapter addresses the historical developments of smart environments in general and smart homes in particular, referring to first attempts considered as smart, e.g. from Leonardo and emphasizing the wrong technology-oriented approach in the field—as shown by the Honeywell kitchen computer. An attempt to change to a more non-technical and HCI-driven approach is shown with the example of the Casa Vecchia project, concluding the chapter.