View article

Internet of things recently emerges as a common platform and service for consumer electronics. This paper presents an interactive framework of visualizing and authoring IoT in indoor environments such as home or small office. Building blocks of the framework are virtual sensors and actuators that abstract physical things and their virtual behaviors on top of their physical networks. Their behaviors are abstracted and programmed through visual authoring tools on the web, which allows a casual consumer to easily monitor and define their behaviors even without knowing the underlying physical connections. The user study performed to assess the usability of the visual authoring showed that the visual authoring is easy to use, understandable, and also preferred to typical text-based script programming.