Home automation faces the challenge of providing ubiquitous, unobtrusive services while empowering users with approachable configuration interfaces. These interfaces need to provide sufficient expressiveness to support complex automation, and notations need to be devised that enable less tech-savvy users to express such scenarios. Rule-based and process-oriented paradigms have emerged as opposing ends of the spectrum; however, their underlying concepts have not been studied comparatively. We report on a contextual inquiry study in which we collected qualitative data from 18 participants in 12 households on the current potential and acceptance of home automation, as well as explored the respective benefits and drawbacks of these two notation paradigms for end users. Results show that rule-based notations are sufficient for simple automation tasks but not flexible enough for more complex use cases. The resulting insights can inform the design of interfaces for smart homes to enable usable real-world home automation for end users.

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While we perceive time as a constant factor in the real world, it can be manipulated in media. Being quite easy for linear media, this is used for various aspects of storytelling e.g., by applying slow motion in movies or TV. Interactive media like VR however poses additional challenges, because user interaction speed is independent from media speed. While it is still possible to change the speed of the environment, for interaction it is also necessary to deal with the emerging speed mismatch, e.g., by slowing down visual feedback of user movements. In this paper, we explore the possibility of such manipulations of visual cues, with the goal of enabling the use of slow motion also in immersive interactive media like VR. We conducted a user study to investigate the impact of limiting angular velocity of a virtual character in first person view in VR. Our findings show that it is possible to use slow motion in VR while maintaining the same levels of presence, enjoyment and susceptibility to motion sickness, while users adjust to the maximum speed quickly. Moreover, our results also show an impact of slowing down user movements on their time estimations.

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