Mappings in the Home:
Selecting Home Appliances in 3D Space

Abstract

Unlike voice assistants, remotes, and smartphones, UIs embedded into furniture and other surfaces offer silent, discreet, and unobtrusive control of smart home appliances. However, as the number of appliances grows, fitting individual controls for each onto the surfaces in our environment becomes impractical, making it necessary to select appliances before controlling them. These appliances are placed in 3D at various heights around the room, while traditional controls are laid out in 2D, complicating control-to-target mapping. We compared six UIs using mappings with spatial analogies that are either absolute or relative to the user's position and perspective. Participants used each to select 20 targets in a simplified living room, once while looking and once eyes-free. We investigated performance and participants' ratings for, inter alia, ease of use, mapping comprehensibility, and mental demand. Map-based controllers were most promising, but participants also ranked perspective projection with touch input highly.

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