Designing the Expressiveness of Point Lights for Bridging Human-IoT System Communications

Abstract

In the last decade, the digital devices and intelligent systems are becoming popular in people’s everyday lives. Many machines could communicate and collaborate as a system to provide various services. However, they seldom provide sufficient feed forwards or feedbacks to help users understand current states and aware what it is about to act. In this study, we explored the possibilities of expressiveness with the point lights embed- ded on ubiquitous devices. By applying the findings from related works and animation principles, we created nine basic individual patterns and composed 12 designs of group behaviors. We then conducted a survey with 69 participants to rate their expressiveness regarding nine vocabularies of the human-system communication. The results show that single light behavior and the performative group light behavior could help to convey specific state information for intuitive communication. At the individual light level, for instance, the fade in light behavior can indicate changes in status; rapid blinking can indicate important information. At the group level, the two designs developed in this study, leading and simultaneous type also can initiate human interactions and repre- sent