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Lightful user interaction on smart wearables

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Abstract

Smart wearables are body-worn small devices that require novel user interaction due to its compactness and wearability. Current UI/UX of smart wearables is rooted in a smartphone-like UI/UX that is inadequate in many cases constrained by such small form factors. To overcome these limitations, research efforts are invested for augmenting wearable devices with various sensors and improving efficiency of existing input modalities through careful orchestration. In this paper, we propose a new concept called lightful user interaction exploiting a readily available ambient light sensor as a novel and alternative user interface for smart wearables. We design and model lightful user interaction based on typical usages of representative smart wearables. Then, we demonstrate the proposed lightful user interaction through three implemented applications such as PIN entry, morse code, and control indicator, respectively. At the end, we evaluate the concept and applications in terms of occluded display area, input expressivity and lightweight implementation aspects to make a case for a promising novel and alternative UI for smart wearables.

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Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) and Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT) through the International Cooperative R&D program [N001228, Development of UI/UX Technology to Overcome the Limitation of Wearable Device UIs]. The authors would like to thank Interactive Contents Team members of Contents Convergence Research Center at KETI, especially Saet-Byeol Yu, Eun-Ae Jang, Ji-Eun Lee, and Min-Sung Park for their support on developing and polishing ideas presented in this paper. Images used in Figs. 1 and 2 are public domain images under Creative Commons CC0. Smartwatch icon on Fig. 4 is by Sherrinford from thenounproject.com.

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  1. Contents Convergence Research Center (CCRC), Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI), Seoul, 03924, South Korea

    Hyoseok Yoon, Se-Ho Park & Kyung-Taek Lee

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  1. Hyoseok Yoon
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  2. Se-Ho Park
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  3. Kyung-Taek Lee
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Correspondence to Hyoseok Yoon.

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Yoon, H., Park, SH. & Lee, KT. Lightful user interaction on smart wearables. Pers Ubiquit Comput 20, 973–984 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0959-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0959-z

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