Visualization and Manipulation of Air Conditioner Flow via Touch Screen

Though air conditioners (A/Cs) have long been a part of homes and businesses alike, the interfaces for adjusting and managing these devices have not changed significantly over the years. In particular, directional A/Cs such as wall mounted, window, or split units commonly found in smaller homes or Asian countries still predominantly require button-based remotes for adjusting the direction and positioning of air vents and flow direction.In this paper, we present a smartphone controlled interface for both manipulating A/C air flow and visualizing the resulting output as a 3D Augmented Reality (AR) overlay. In contrast with previous work, we generate airflow models based on the A/C's exhaust vents, allowing users to see the effects of interactions on airflow in real time. We also implemented and tested three different methods for manipulation including, swipe, drag and button based manipulations using finger or device gestures. Experiments showed that participants (N=50) were able to control air flow most quickly with the swipe based interface, which outperformed the drag and button median completion times by 26.5% and 36.1%, respectively.