T.Hue was a prototype built for my master's thesis, which investigated the usability and user experience of smart home products, specifically smart lights. T.Hue was built to test how a combination of tangible user interfaces and graphical user interfaces could improve the usability of smart home products.
Tool stack
T.Hue consists of an e-paper touch display and two dials. Depending on the context and the action the user wants to perform either one or a combination of the touch and dials are used.
How T.Hue is used to interact with smart light in a home.
Figma was used to design the UI for the e-paper touch screen. The UI was implemented in C++.
https://www.figma.com/embed?embed_host=share&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.figma.com%2Fproto%2F0PR3brvUSBGaADc6gEGDD6%2FSmart-Home---E-Ink%3Fpage-id%3D0%253A1%26node-id%3D1%253A2%26viewport%3D241%252C-76%252C0.41%26scaling%3Dcontain%26starting-point-node-id%3D1%253A2
Fusion 360 was used to design and engineer the 3D printed dials and case for the T.Hue hardware.
3D renderings of the final prototype.
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We are developing and assembling the prototype.
T.Hue was developed on an ESP32 microcontroller with the e-paper touch screen and two rotary encoders. One encoder with perceivable dents to make the right feel for the user going through lists, changing modes etc. and the other encoder was smooth which was used for changing continuous values e.g., brightness.
Before the implementation of T.Hue prior experiments and studies were conducted. Interviews were conducted with smart home users to understand their usage and experience with smart home products. Usability tests were conducted to investigate current solutions. Psychophysical tests were conducted to understand how people are perceiving changes in light depending on light conditions in a room.
