Future Tools for the Home

Technology will revolutionize the tools that are used in the home of the near future. Embedded computing, sensing and actuation technologies—coupled with new infrastructure in the built environment itself—will combine to enable new opportunities to support the work of the home. Taking fullest advantage of these opportunities requires that we understand both the base technology on which these new tools will be built, as well as the domestic setting in which they will be used.
For example, robots are one category of home tools that people will likely increasingly purchase for their homes. However, to date very little is known about how to design robotic products that fit into the home, do meaningful work there, and are desirable to own. These are critical questions to answer if we are going to design usable and useful home tools for the future. Understanding how current home tools (including devices such as the iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner) fit into the work of the home can shed light on how to design the next generation of domestic robots. Such understanding can also inform the creation of new low-level technologies that can be built into tools, or into the home infrastructure itself.

Some possible outputs that our team could deliver in the first year include:
• Integrate a collection of digital home improvement tools, including stud finder, tape measure, and color detector, into a mobile telephony platform
• Develop technology to collect and recycle “grey water” in the home to water plants and flush toilets
• Prototype systems to automatically control curtains and blinds to save electric and other energy costs while maintaining optimal lighting for a room
• Empirical studies and analysis to understand the role of new technologies in the home and how homeowners desire these technologies to fit into domestic practices
• New core infrastructure technology that could be applied to a range of applications, such as self-powered wireless sensors or low-cost location detection mechanisms that are suitable for deployment in the home
• New sensing technologies and algorithms appropriate for home robotics applications

Projects

Tangible UIs for networking
Much of the home networking infrastructure is currently invisible, meaning that householders often have few affordances for how to control their networks. What if instead we provided tangible interfaces to home networking? We are developing tangible interfaces to facilitate more intuitive and richer interactions by making the home network more direct and manipulable. This project is exploring ways to incorporate the tangible interface into various home network elements including network setup and management, security, service composition among multiple networked devices, and media sharing among homes.

Ambient router
People often hide their home networking equipment in closets or under furniture. Rather than having networking equipment something to hide away, what if we could rebuild networking equipment so that it is fun, engaging, and something that you would want to have on display in your house?



Secure home network device provisioning
Householders report that device setup is one of the most challenging aspects of home networking. The ICEbox project is focused on providing easier mechanisms for provisioning client devices at the data link layer (enabling secure access to the network link), the transport layer (IP address assignment), and application layer (file shares, printer configuration), as well as more robust forms of network discovery, mapping, and management.


Home network visualization
The netviz project is exploring interactive visual representations for understanding and exploring the home network. The design of these visual representations is based in our earlier ethnographic fieldwork on understanding the needs and models of home network users, and uses a zooming metaphor to provide progressive revelation of information about network structure and detail.



Collaborative remote troubleshooting
When you've had problems with your home network, have you ever called a family member or friend for help? We're investigating ways to make it easier for people in different locations to communicate about their home networking problems and work together to fix them.



Customer service call analysis
We are analyzing a large dataset of actual calls to a home networking customer support telephone line. From this data, we hope to understand real-life challenges people face when setting up and fixing their networks.




Empirical studies of information sharing practices
n order to design better tools for home networks, we need to understand what homeowners are doing with their networks, rather than simply relying on our own intuitions. This project aims to learn about householder’s practices for information sharing on—and between—home networks, through a combination of home visits to actual users’ homes as well as structured interviews about their networks


End-user sketch analysis
People often have a difficult time describing infrastructure technologies such as networks. We are creating new research techniques to help people better communicate with researchers about the technologies they use in their lives.




Studying the Proximity of Mobile Devices to Users
People: Shwetak Patel, Julie Kientz, Lana Yarosh, Gregory Abowd
Many Ubicomp and mobile applications being developed assume users alway have their phones nearby, but we suspect that this may not always be true. Thus, we are empirically studying the proximity of users to mobile devices to determine people's usage of mobile phones.


Virtual Rear Projection
People: Jay Summet, Gregory Abowd
Creating interactive surfaces with rear projected properties using multiple front projectors, allowing flexible deployment of interactive wall sized displays. This research has led to the release of the GVU PROCAMS toolkit, designed to ease the construction of projector camera systems.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/vrp/

Capture Resistant Environment
Khai Truong, Shwetak Patel, Jay Summet, Gregory Abowd
The Capture Resistant Environment uses cameras and projectors to prevent unauthorized photography and video recording. The camera can detect the lens of a digital camera and the projected light can neutralize the camera, making any images or video recordings blurred and thus useless.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~summetj/cre

Powerline Positioning
Shwetak Patel, Khai Truong, Erich Stuntebeck, Gregory Abowd
PowerLine Positioning (PLP) is an inexpensive technique that uses
fingerprinting of multiple tones transmitted along the powerline to achieve subroom-
level localization. We have compared PLP to other fingerprinting techniques and found that it compares favorably. read more


iCam
Shwetak Patel, Jun Rekimoto, Gregory Abowd
Effective integration of sensing and laser-assisted interaction have resulted in a handheld device, the iCam, which simultaneously calculates its own location as well as the location of another object in the environment. iCam demonstrates how location-aware, at-a-distance interaction simplifies certain location-aware activities.


TrackSense
Shwetak Patel, Moritz Koehler, Jay Summet, Erich Stuntebeck, Gregory Abowd
While commercial solutions for precise indoor positioning exist, they are costly and require installation of additional infrastructure, which limits opportunities for widespread adoption. We have developed a self-contained solution to precise indoor positioning that requires no additional environmental infrastructure. Evaluation of our prototype indicates that such a system can deliver up to 4 cm accuracy with 3 cm precision in rooms up to five meters squared, as well as 2 degree accuracy and 1 degree precision on orientation.

The Tableaux Machine at the Aware Home/Alien Presence
Mario Romero, Zach Pousman, Michael Mateas
Alien Presence is an AI-based interpretation of human activity with expressive, ambient, physical displays. The idea is to explore the subjective affordances of context aware ubiquitous devices. Do these devices simply help us juggle more tasks on our to-do lists, or can they help us to experience our own lives in new, deeper and more meaningful ways. We are specifically working on a system called the Tableau Machine. It is similar to Michael’s Office Plant #1, but instead of recognizing patterns in the inbox of the user email using NLP, it recognizes the “mood” of a household (the Aware Home) with low level perception. It maps the perception to autonomously constructed physical, miniature, abstract tableaux.

The Beware Home
Thad Starner, Maribeth Gandy, Andy Quay, Blair MacIntyre, Gregory Abowd, Cory Kidd
In the Broadband Institute Residential Laboratory, we are exploring interaction techniques for a contextually aware home [1]. Here we describe several recent projects that were adapted to create a haunted house for demonstration to the International Symposium for Wearable Computers conference during the month of October. These projects included three augmented realities, a location system, and
five methods of interacting with the home environment.

Privacy in an Aware Home
Kelly Caine, Dan Fisk, Wendy Rogers & Michelle Kwasny
Older adults in particular stand to benefit from new technologies that use visual sensing devices to collect and share information about residents of smart or aware homes. However, there is little research that explores the privacy concerns older adults may have when choosing whether to use these technologies in their homes. The goal of this study is to examine any potential privacy concerns that older adults may have about.
http://www.hfaging.org/projects.html#privacy