Sweet Spot: Displaying Interaction Areas on Everyday Home Surfaces using AR

Abstract

In a typical home or office setting, a work desk provides a surface that primarily holds objects and is used for everyday tasks such as writing and typing. However, given its centrality and multiple surfaces, many of which are always unoccupied, an ordinary table may find secondary usage as an alternative interface to control facets of a smart home. For tabletop surfaces to work efficiently as alternative interfaces, there is a need to determine their most reachable zones and those that do not have too much clutter. We present Sweet Spots, an AR platform to visualize easily accessible and non-cluttered areas on table-like surfaces using augmented reality to assess suitable interaction areas. Sweet Spots provides designers and researchers with a tool to visualize their ideas and to take the exploration of key parameters that make an interaction area a Sweet Spot.