Smart devices and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are replacing or being incorporated into traditional devices at a growing pace. The use of digital interfaces to interact with these devices has become a common occurrence in homes, work spaces, and various industries around the world. The most common interfaces for these connected devices focus on mobile apps or voice control via intelligent virtual assistants. However, with augmented reality (AR) becoming more popular and accessible among consumers, there are new opportunities for spatial user interfaces to seamlessly bridge the gap between digital and physical affordances. In this paper, we present a human-subject study evaluating and comparing four user interfaces for smart connected environments: gaze input, hand gestures, voice input, and a mobile app. We assessed participants’ user experience, usability, task load, completion time, and preferences. Our results show multiple trade-offs between these interfaces across these measures. In particular, we found that gaze input shows great potential for future use cases, while both gaze input and hand gestures suffer from limited familiarity among users, compared to voice input and mobile apps.
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Smart Home Agents and Devices of Today and Tomorrow: Surveying Use and Desires
How are people using current smart home technologies, and how
do they conceptualize future ones that are more interconnected and
more capable than those available today? We deployed an online
survey study to 150 participants to investigate use of and opinions
about smart speakers, home robots, virtual assistants, and other
smart home devices.We also gauged how impressions of connected
smart home devices are shaped by the way the devices interact with
one another. Through a mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative
approach, we found that people mostly use single devices for
single functions, and have simple and brief interactions with virtual
assistants. However, they imagine their future devices to have
more control over the physical environment (i.e., interact with each
other) and envision them interacting with people in more socially
complex ways. These findings motivate design considerations and
research directions for connected smart home technologies.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734456
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10357170
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- HAI '21: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 300 to 304
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3472307.3484664
