Augmenting natural interaction with physical paper in ambient intelligence environments

Physical paper, in its various forms (e.g. books, leaflets, catalogues), is extensively used in everyday activities, despite any advancements in digital technology and ICT. Inspired by the popularity of this medium, several research efforts have envisioned and pursued a new era of interactive paper, however several challenges still remain to be addressed. On the other hand, recent advancements towards Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and Smart environments, bear the promise of seamless integration of the physical and digital worlds in an intuitive and user-friendly manner. This paper presents InPrinted, a systematic and generic framework supporting physical paper augmentation and user interaction in Ambient intelligence environments. InPrinted enables natural multimodal user interaction with any kind of printed matter in smart environments, providing context aware and anticipation mechanisms, as well as tools and interaction techniques that support the development of applications incorporating printed matter augmentation. InPrinted has been put to practice in the development of various systems, including the Interactive Maps system, facilitating interaction with printed maps as well as their augmentation with digital information. The results of an in-situ observation experiment of the Interactive Maps system are reported, highlighting that interacting with augmented paper is quite easy and natural, while the overall User Experience is positive.