Smart Ring With Camera Controls Home Devices

While smart devices in homes have grown to include speakers, security systems, lights and thermostats, the ways to control them have remained relatively stable. Users can interact with a phone, or talk to the tech, but these are frequently less convenient than the simple switches they replace: "Turn on the lamp…. Not that one…. Turn up the speaker volume…. Not that loud!"

University of Washington researchers have developed IRIS, a smart ring that allows users to control smart devices by aiming the ring's small camera at the device and clicking a built-in button. The prototype Bluetooth ring sends an image of the selected device to the user's phone, which controls the device. The user can adjust the device with the button and - for devices with gradient controls, such as a speaker's volume - by rotating their hand. IRIS, or Interactive Ring for Interfacing with Smart home devices, operates off a charge for 16-24 hours.

The team presented its research Oct. 16 at the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Pittsburgh. IRIS is not currently available to the public.

"Voice commands can often be really cumbersome," said co-lead author Maruchi Kim, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "We wanted to create something that's as simple and intuitive as clicking on an icon on your computer desktop."

The team decided to put the system in a ring because they believed users would realistically wear that throughout the day. The challenge, then, was integrating a camera into a wireless smart ring with its size and power constraints. The system also had to toggle devices in under a second; otherwise, users tend to think it is not working.

To achieve this, researchers had the ring compress the images before sending them to a phone. Rather than streaming images all the time, the ring gets activated when the user clicks the button, then turns off after 3 seconds of inactivity.