ESPBoost:A Rapid Prototyping Toolkit for Helping Designers Create the Internet of Tangible Things

Although the applications of IoT are significantly developed in the past decade, most of the user interfaces are designed with the graphical or voice modality provided on another device, such as a smartphone or speaker. Researchers have started to investigate how to promote rich interactions embodied in physical IoT objects namely the Internet of Tangible Things (IoTT). However, most studies mainly focused on the explorations of tangible concepts. Due to the technical bottleneck, very few concepts were actually implemented and validated with their complete idea. There is a need for rapid prototyping toolkits to help designers easily assemble technical components to build tangible prototypes and evaluate the user experiences in real contexts. In this position paper, we present an under-development toolkit called ESPBoost. It has modular hardware featured in four aspects: connectivity, tangible input, tangible output, and power management. We explain the details of our toolkit and how it could facilitate the designers' iterative creation process. By applying the fabricated ESPBoost onto a challenging design case, we also surface ESPBoost's limitations and plan an evaluation study for investigating its efficacy. With ESPBoost, we aim to provoke designers' creations of the user experiences of IoTT without spending significant time and effort in trying to configure endless choices of electronic components.