RIME: Rich Interactive Materials for Everyday Objects in the Home

智能家居的用户体验处于危机之中。智能设备和家用电器正在迅速进入家庭，导致学习和记忆的个人用户界面令人困惑。因此，用户会犯错，变得沮丧，并经常放弃有希望的解决方案。试图通过语音助手或空中手势统一这些界面，会造成看不见的、难以发现的界面、尴尬的社交场景，并很快达到其极限，例如通过语音控制连续值时。智能手机被称为“通用遥控器”，不能很好地与家庭中自然的社交习惯相结合，而且，像所有的触摸屏一样，我们的手只能在平凡的玻璃表面上用1-2个手指轻敲和滑动。这与我们的手所允许的丰富的互动是不公平的。在我们的进化过程中，我们的手一直是我们与周围无生命的物体和材料互动的方式，而声音和空中手势是专门为了与其他生物互动而发展起来的。这可能解释了今天用户在被要求与智能家居中的对象交谈或打手势时经常感到不安的原因。几百万年来，我们的手已经进化成能够表达丰富的词汇，掌握和有形的操纵手势，并触摸、感觉和亲密地体验丰富的各种材料和物体特性，这些材料和物体特性可以告诉我们并使我们高兴。RIME(家庭日常用品的丰富交互材料)的目标是释放这一潜力，并设计、评估和评估与国内外个人智能空间的参数可扩展、丰富的基于触摸的交互。RIME通过将基础研究原则与以用户为中心的现代人机交互方法相结合的结构化研究议程来应对这一挑战。其核心是为家庭中的日常物品配备互动表面“皮肤”和材料，这些材料可以感知这种丰富的触摸输入，并提供适当的多模式反馈。为了使我们的研究扎根，我们首先引出了目前的做法，包括在实验室和实地研究中触摸日常家居物品，以了解在哪里放置潜在的Rime组件(WP1)。基于这些发现，我们对可能的交互技术进行了分类，并研究了使其可被发现的方法，将日常处理与数字触摸输入区分开来，将RIME组件上的输入映射到其目标，以及根据不同的用户和环境进行缩放(WP2)。我们评估创建局部和环境反馈的方法(WP3)，并在数字制造中创建必要的基础，以创建可伸展皮肤和材料的可伸缩、参数模型，这些模型集成了触摸、力和变形传感器、形状改变和其他触觉执行器以及视觉输出(WP4)。我们与利益相关者反复验证我们的研究结果，并将它们集成到概念框架和基于模型的指导方针中，以用于未来的设计工具(WP5)。

The user experience of the smart home is in a crisis. Smart devices and appliances are rapidly entering the home, leading to a confusing mix of individual user interfaces to learn and remember. Consequently, users make mistakes, become frustrated, and often abandon promising solutions. Attempting to unify these interfaces through voice assistants or mid-air gestures creates invisible, hard-to-discover interfaces, awkward social situations, and quickly reaches its limits, such as when controlling a continuous value via voice. The smartphone as “universal remote” does not integrate well with natural social practices in the home and, like all touchscreens, limits our hands to tapping and swiping with 1–2 fingers on a featureless glass surface. This does not do justice to the rich interactions our hands allow.Throughout our evolution, our hands have always been how we interact with the inanimate objects and materials around us, while voice and mid-air gestures have developed specifically to interact with other living beings. This may explain the unease users frequently feel when asked to talk or gesture to objects in their smart home today. Over several million years, our hands have evolved to become capable of expressing a rich vocabulary of grasps and tangible manipulation gestures, and to touch, sense, and intimately experience the rich variety of material and object properties that can inform and delight us. The goal of RIME (Rich Interactive Materials for Everyday Objects in the Home) is to unlock this potential and design, evaluate and assess parametrically scalable, rich touch-based interactions with personal smart spaces at home and beyond.RIME tackles this challenge through a structured research agenda combining the principles of fundamental research with the user-centered approach of modern Human-Computer Interaction. At its core lies the idea to equip everyday objects in the home with interactive surface “skins” and materials that can sense this rich touch input and provide appropriate multimodal feedback. To ground our research, we first elicit current practices that involve touching everyday home objects in lab and field studies, to understand where to place potential RIME components (WP1). Based on these findings, we classify possible interaction techniques and examine ways to make them discoverable, disambiguate everyday handling from digital touch input, map input on a RIME component to its target, and scale to different users and contexts (WP2). We evaluate ways to create local and ambient feedback (WP3), and create the necessary foundations in digital fabrication to create scalable, parametric models of stretchable skins and materials that integrate touch, force, and deformation sensors, shape-changing and other haptic actuators, and visual output (WP4). We iteratively validate our results in studies with stakeholders, and integrate them into conceptual frameworks and model-based guidelines for future design tools (WP5).