The Role of Affordances and Interaction Bits in the Design of a New Tangible Programming Interface: A Preliminary Result.

In this paper, we present three scenarios driven by a set of interactions that we developed to empower non-technical end users to understand, create, and control their smart environment. We used a projected interface with tangible controls and a corresponding interactive system to experiment with ways to 1) teach basic programming constructs to non-technical users, 2) create smart behavior by instantiating a projected template, and 3) control the environment by interacting with a device manager template. We focused on the interaction bits, the affordances of the tangible controls, and the role fiducials — amoeba-like symbols which can be detected and tracked with a camera — may play as a technical starting point for the interactions. We report our preliminary result in the context of a meeting room usability study to validate the scenarios and their interactions.