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Marquardt, N., Diaz-Marino, R., Boring, S. and Greenberg, S. (2011)
The Proximity Toolkit: Prototyping Proxemic Interactions in Ubiquitous Computing Ecologies. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology – ACM UIST’2011. (Santa Barbara, CA, USA), ACM Press, 11 pages, October 16-18. Includes video figure, duration 4:19.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper and video figure).
Earlier, somewhat different version: Report 2011-1001-13 (paper and video), April.
DOI: 10.1145/2047196.2047238
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Abstract.
People naturally understand and use proxemic relationships (e.g., their distance and orientation towards others) in everyday situations. However, only few ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) systems interpret such proxemic relationships to mediate interaction (proxemic interaction). A technical problem is that developers find it challenging and tedious to access proxemic information from sensors. Our Proximity Toolkit solves this problem. It simplifies the exploration of interaction techniques by supplying fine-grained proxemic information between people, portable devices, large interactive surfaces, and other non-digital objects in a room-sized environment. The toolkit offers three key features. 1) It facilitates rapid prototyping of proxemic-aware systems by supplying developers with the orientation, distance, motion, identity, and location information between entities. 2) It includes various tools, such as a visual monitoring tool, that allows developers to visually observe, record and explore proxemic relationships in 3D space. (3) Its flexible architecture separates sensing hardware from the proxemic data model derived from these sensors, which means that a variety of sensing technologies can be substituted or combined to derive proxemic information. We illustrate the versatility of the toolkit with proxemic-aware systems built by students.