The role of affordances and interaction bits in the design of new Tangible programming interface: a preliminary result

In this paper we present three scenarios driven by a new set of interactions that we developed to empower non-technical end users to understand, create and control their smart environment. Our research methodology drives the design of a projected interface with tangible controls and a corresponding interactive system to empower ordinary users. We will stress the focus on the interaction bits, the affordances of the tangible controls and explain the role of fiducial recognition as a technical starting point for the interactions. The main scenarios of our new interactive system are: (1) To serve as a basic teaching programming system for end users (2) to create smart behaviour by instantiating a projected template and (3) to control the environment by interacting with a device manager template. We report our preliminary result in the context of a meeting room usability study to validate the scenarios and their interactions.