GlasSees

About

Increasingly, swarm devices in our built environment are networked and can be controlled remotely (visit SwarmLab and TerraSwarm for more on swarm vision). Their proliferation has raised the question of how to best interact with them, especially how to select the intended target. Existing list-browsing solutions have problems in scaling, and there is no consensus naming for physical appliances (use "Light 4 in area E"?).

There are various approaches, and we take the perspective of interacting with the swarm throught visual attention -- "what you see is what you can control". We illustrate an initial approach in the following figure, where a wearable device is employed to assist such interaction.

To explore and evaluate on this interaction technique, we have augmented Google Glass with a narrow-beam IR emitter for this purpose. This configuration yields a usable beam width of 2 to 4 feet (60 to 120cm) for targeting at room scale. And we instruments clients with IR receivers and LEDs for direct visual feedback.

A user initiates interaction by looking at the appliance he wants to control. Tapping on the Glass touchpad then pulls up a user interface for that device on the display. This technique can be used to control lighting, HVAC or Smart TVs.

Yu-Hsiang Chen, Ben Zhang, Claire Tuna, Yang Li, Edward Lee, Björn Hartmann

This project was made possible by: CITRIS Invention Lab, Swarm Lab, TerraSwarm Research Center, Berkeley Institute of Design.

A Context Menu for the Real World: Controlling Physical Appliances Through Head-Worn Infrared Targeting [paper] Yu-Hsiang Chen, Ben Zhang, Claire Tuna, Yang Li, Edward A. Lee and Björn Hartmann
EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley, Technical Report

Photos

Demo video

Custom 3d Printed Parts

In the press

• Google Glass mod gives you control over home appliances with one touch pairing by Engadget on 2013-12-10