Sharif Digital Repository

This paper describes concepts, design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a 3D-based user interface for accessing IoT-based Smart Environments (IoT-SE). The generic interaction model of the described work addresses some major challenges of Human-IoT-SE-Interaction such as cognitive overload associated with manual device selection in complex IoT-SE, loss of user control, missing system image or over-automation. To address these challenges we propose a 3D-based mobile interface for mixed-initiative interaction in IoT-SE. The 3D visualization and 3D UI, acting as the central feature of the system, create a logical link between physical devices and their virtual representation on the... 

This paper describes concepts, design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a 3D-based user interface for accessing IoT-based Smart Environments (IoT-SE). The generic interaction model of the described work addresses some major challenges of Human-IoT-SE-Interaction such as cognitive overload associated with manual device selection in complex IoT-SE, loss of user control, missing system image or over-automation. To address these challenges we propose a 3D-based mobile interface for mixed-initiative interaction in IoT-SE. The 3D visualization and 3D UI, acting as the central feature of the system, create a logical link between physical devices and their virtual representation on the... 

Nowadays, handheld devices such as smartphones provide users with multi-touch input screens. Displaying interactive and touch-enabled 3D environments in such handheld devices has become popular in different applications like games or virtual reality. Technologies such as Web3D and WebGL have made the creation and display of 3D environments in mobile devices easier than ever. However, object manipulation techniques are not as well developed. For example, moving an object within the 3D environment or other similar object-specific manipulations are neither intuitive nor easy to perform. Current manipulation techniques like Gizmo that are successful in systems that use mouse and keyboard are not... 

An important challenge in smart environments is how to manipulate the smart objects. Although mobile applications are typically used for controlling a smart environment, no previous study has evaluated the users performance in manipulating smart objects under different environmental complexities. This article presents an experimental comparison between three different selection techniques 3-D, 2-D, and physical user interfaces (UIs). We evaluate these techniques across two levels of environment complexity measuring 51 participants timing data and errors. Our results indicate that the 3-D UI is superior for task completion time and error, and the 2-D UI is not a better solution than the... 

Conflict is one of the important factors affecting user satisfaction and trust in smart environments, yet conflict modeling in mixed initiative smart environments has not been sufficiently explored. Most of the existing literature on conflict in smart homes are centered on conflicts between users. Although research has shown that about 75% of conflicts are between users and system [1], only a few studies have considered user-system conflicts in smart homes. The aim of this article is to empirically propose both a definition and a run-time detection method for conflicts between users and smart home systems. Our empirical study is based on conflict sample scenarios collected from 163 users.... 

Smart environments are complex systems encompassing multitude of devices with complex interconnections and interactions. User must not only be able to figure out the devices’ functionalities, but also understand the architectural and semantic relations between various components. Providing such information leads to better understanding and user satisfaction, if users get the appropriate mental models. One way to train users about such smart environments is Interactive Realistic Virtual Reality based Simulations (IRVRS): multimedia rich collaborative 3D virtual environments. IRVRS also facilitate easy and inexpensive access to population masses, thus they can be used for conducting large... 

Ambient Intelligence is a new paradigm in information technology that creates environments able to detect and respond to users’ needs, actions, behaviors and feelings. User trust plays an important role in accepting Ambient Intelligence environments. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a virtual reality based testbed for studying trust in Ambient Intelligence Environments  

Face to face meetings and physical presence are important concepts in student-professor relations. Many students require flexibility in arranging meetings or the possibility of ad-hoc meeting with their professors. However, adhoc meetings could be difficult to arrange due to busy schedule of professors. It is not unusual for students to attempt several times in a day to catch a professor, or wait an hour behind his door. To overcome this challenge, some professors have teaching assistants (TAs) or office assistant who manage their schedule or provide students with helpful information on how to reach them or handover their documents, projects, etc. Many other professors do not have any... 

Mobile e-health applications provide users and healthcare practitioners with an insightful way to check users/patients’ status and monitor their daily calorie intake. Mobile e-health applications provide users and healthcare practitioners with an insightful way to check users/patients’ status and monitor their daily activities. This paper proposes a cloud-based mobile e-health calorie system that can classify food objects in the plate and further compute the overall calorie of each food object with high accuracy. The novelty in our system is that we are not only offloading heavy computational functions of the system to the cloud, but also employing an intelligent cloud-broker mechanism to...