ProObjAR: Prototyping Spatially-aware Interactions of Smart Objects with AR-HMD

The rapid advances in technologies have brought new interaction paradigms of smart objects (e.g., digital devices) beyond digital device screens. By utilizing spatial properties, configurations, and movements of smart objects, designing spatial interaction, which is one of the emerging interaction paradigms, efficiently promotes engagement with digital content and physical facility. However, as an important phase of design, prototyping such interactions still remains challenging, since there is no ad-hoc approach for this emerging paradigm. Designers usually rely on methods that require fixed hardware setup and advanced coding skills to script and validate early-stage concepts. These requirements restrict the design process to a limited group of users in indoor scenes. To facilitate the prototyping to general usages, we aim to figure out the design difficulties and underlying needs of current design processes for spatially-aware object interactions by empirical studies. Besides, we explore the design space of the spatial interaction for smart objects and discuss the design space in an input-output spatial interaction model. Based on these findings, we present ProObjAR, an all-in-one novel prototyping system with an Augmented Reality Head Mounted Display (AR-HMD). Our system allows designers to easily obtain the spatial data of smart objects being prototyped, specify spatially-aware interactive behaviors from an input-output event triggering workflow, and test the prototyping results in situ. From the user study, we find that ProObjAR simplifies the design procedure and increases design efficiency to a large extent and thus advancing the development of spatially-aware applications in smart ecosystems.