TactCube: Designing Mobile Interactions with Ambient Intelligence

This paper presents TactCube, a novel tangible user interface based on a cube-shaped device. It is designed to interact with Ambient Intelligence and allows users to give commands and receive rich feedback using only one hand. A guessability user study was conducted involving 60 participants and results were used to map the device interactions onto commands invoked on an Ambient Intelligence system. The study considered three smart devices, properly a smart speaker, a smart bulb, and a smart curtain. For each of the devices, users were asked to propose his/her favorite interaction modality through TactCube, for 12 different commands and a kind of admissible feedback for 8 different states of the ambient intelligence system. The analysis of the responses led us to derive a set of interaction design implications which could be taken into account for any tangible interface inside an intelligent ambient system.