IRIS: Wireless Ring for Vision-based Smart Home Interaction
This work addresses smart home interaction problems for users by enabling vision-based control via a wearable ring, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing ring and gesture interaction concepts with specific hardware integration.
The authors tackled the challenge of integrating cameras into wireless smart rings for smart home interactions by introducing IRIS, a system that meets size, weight, and power constraints and lasts 16-24 hours on a charge, and in a study with 23 participants, it consistently outperformed voice commands in user preference for tasks like toggling devices and granular control.
Integrating cameras into wireless smart rings has been challenging due to size and power constraints. We introduce IRIS, the first wireless vision-enabled smart ring system for smart home interactions. Equipped with a camera, Bluetooth radio, inertial measurement unit (IMU), and an onboard battery, IRIS meets the small size, weight, and power (SWaP) requirements for ring devices. IRIS is context-aware, adapting its gesture set to the detected device, and can last for 16-24 hours on a single charge. IRIS leverages the scene semantics to achieve instance-level device recognition. In a study involving 23 participants, IRIS consistently outpaced voice commands, with a higher proportion of participants expressing a preference for IRIS over voice commands regarding toggling a device's state, granular control, and social acceptability. Our work pushes the boundary of what is possible with ring form-factor devices, addressing system challenges and opening up novel interaction capabilities.