Bridging Digital and Physical Worlds Using Tangible Drag-and-Drop Interfaces

The last ten years have seen an explosion in the diversity of digital-life devices, e.g. music and video players. However, the interaction paradigm to use these devices has remained mostly unchanged. Remote controls are still the most common way to manage a digital-life device. Moreover, the interaction between devices themselves is still very limited and rarely addressed by a remote control interface. We present in this paper a study of tangible drag-and-drop, a remote control interface based on the well-known paradigm coming from the graphical user interface. This interaction technique aims at reducing the gap between the digital and physical worlds, enabling the transfer of digital data from one device to another. To validate such a concept, we present two prototypes, along with user studies and a general discussion about the tangible drag-and-drop technique

Content and Context-Aware Interfaces for Smarter Media Control

Since the arrival of the computer at home during the '80s, the importance of the digital world in our daily lives has hugely increased. First centralized on a unique computer, the digital world spread over several devices that surround us: smartphones, tablets, cameras, music players, etc. However, despite the increasing number of devices around our digital lives, the way we interact with them has barely evolved. Digital devices are not aware of their surrounding environment, and they often use interfaces and mechanisms which are computer-oriented. The next step in the evolution of our digital life will be centered on a better integration of the digital world with the ecosystem of devices that surrounds it. In this work, we illustrate this upcoming evolution through the development and evaluation of original interfaces dedicated to the control of digital media. Based on our research, we organize these interfaces in three areas of improvement: unification, automation and familiarity. This thesis is divided in four main chapters. The first chapter presents the evolution of our digital world over the last 30 years. The next three chapters are centered on the three areas of improvement that we defined: unification, automation and familiarity. Unification corresponds to the fusion of digital worlds as a unique and coherent whole that devices should interact with. Automation consists in using information obtained from the user and her environment in order to simplify or automate the interaction with the digital world. Finally, familiarity allows benefiting of users' past experiences in order to create friendly and intuitive interfaces