Design a Smart Home Interface

ased mock-ups provide a good visual fidelity, they lack in behavioral
simulation and natural interaction. Consequently, Mixed Reality (MR)
environments have drawn a lot of attention in the field of UCD as they
combine real and virtual worlds in various proportions and present them
as a unified whole. Within the MR framework, the Augmented Reality
(AR) technique is one of the most adopted one due to the low cost of the
technologies and to its ability to enhance the real scene with computer
graphics and emerging tactile and sound rendering displays. While there
has been substantial research on the underlying technology, user
experience and interaction techniques are poorly explored. In this context,
the present paper describes a structured UCD approach to design highly
usable control devices dedicated to manage the functionalities of smart
grid platforms for home automation. The focus of the study is on the
development of the graphical user interface (GUI) dedicated to desktop
PCs, smart phones and other personal digital assistant devices generally
used as preferred tools for software platform access and control.
To improve the efficiency of the proposed UCD approach, Tangible
Augmented Reality (TAR) techniques are exploited to virtually prototype
the conceived design solutions and carry out usability testing with sample
users. Experimental results show that designers do not require extra work
to build TAR prototypes or modify solutions to meet users' explicit and
implicit needs. TAR sensibility increases timesaving compared with
traditional prototyping approaches. The proposed approach and TAR
prototyping technique are adopted in a particular case study that is an
innovative domestic smart grid platform, called Homeline, to monitor and
manage energy at home consumptions.
The research partner is Indesit Company S.p.a, World leader
manufacturer in household appliances, that developed the Homeline
platform.(Ceccacci, Germani, & Mengoni, 2013)
2.0 The development of smart homes
Through a review of existing literature on the subject, this section sets out
the context to this paper: providing a working defi- nition for the term
„smart home‟; identifying key infrastructure choices; and outlining the
UK policy and regulatory background.