At Philips Research, an Intelligent Shop Window (ISW) was developed. With the ISW, a unique combination is made between a transparent display that is embedded in the window glass, and physical products presented in the shop window. In this paper, touch and gaze interaction with the large display in the ISW are investigated and evaluated. For sensing interfaces it is known that especially with gaze interaction, it is a challenge to communicate to the user that the system is ready and attending to the user, but also which part of the system the user can address. Therefore, two suitable feedback mechanisms for this interaction were designed and evaluated with users. The first was the ’polite products’ concept, where products were placed on a turntable. When the user selects the product with either touch or gaze interaction, the product on the turntable turns towards the user. The second feedback method was a transparent light tile behind the products, which changed color when the product was selected. The evaluation results showed that the polite product concept was rated better than the light tile on almost every item related to hedonic values such as enjoyability and fun. Next to that it became clear that participants felt more in control when using touch interaction and that touch worked faster and more efficient than gaze interaction. However, gaze interaction was a fairly new and exotic interaction method for participants and they said they liked using gaze interaction. Especially the combination of gaze interaction with the polite products feedback method was very strong.

Context awareness will become increasingly important in future domestic consumer electronics. In many domestic context aware applications, there is a need for location and orientation information about persons, devices or objects in the home. This information can be provided by a dedicated indoor location system. A consumer location system should be robust, safe, easy to set up, low cost, and should have a minimal infrastructure. In this paper, a step towards consumer location systems is taken by proposing an ultrasonic positioning method that needs just a single compact base station to measure 3D positions of mobile devices in a room. The method employs ultrasound time-of-flight tri-lateration to estimate device positions, using a base station containing an array of three ultrasound transducers. Five potential problems of the proposed method are identified; the main problem being line-of-sight path occlusion. The method has been prototyped, and initial results show an accuracy of 1.41 m or better for 95% of the position estimates, in case of a good line-of-sight path. It is concluded that the method is promising for providing 3D position information at around 1 m accuracy for context aware applications, but that the problem of line-of-sight occlusion requires further investigation.