Augmented Miniature Prototyping Toolkit for UX in Interactive Space

Abstract

It is challenging to envision the user experience (UX) within an interactive and ubiquitous computing space in the early phases of a design process due to the large scale and complex interactivity among multiple people and agents. To address the limitations of existing tools, we present miniStudio, a prototyping toolkit for interactive and ubiquitous computing environments larger than human scale. It consists of software and hardware kits for constructing miniature physical spaces and testing dynamic interactions in them through a combination of paper models and Lego. It also supports prototyping for interactivity using projection-based augmented reality with invisible markers and a pro-cam system in instantly created miniature spaces. We applied Adobe Photoshop as an interactivity authoring environment since it is one of the most popular design tools. From the preliminary evaluation with junior designers, miniStudio showed the potential to support the iterative exploration of interactive spaces in the early phases of the design process.