The eMote is developed in the iHome project of interactivespaces. The eMote is developed as a down sampled version of the interactive ball introduced in the vision video prototype playful interaction.

In the iHome project the eMote was thought to provoke and push the way we at interactivespaces and the project partners at B&O looked at interaction in functional and aesthetic ways.

The concept of the eMote is to use gestures as input instead of pushing buttons. By measuring the users different movements with the eMote device, these can be sent wireless to e.g. a hifi system and mapped to different functions. In this way the interaction becomes more playful and relates in new ways to the body and the surrounding space.

The eMote I was a reverse engineered remote control from B&O that jesper nielsen supplied with accelerometers and a bluetooth chip. It worked but the user still saw and decoded the device as a normal remote control with buttons why he chose to hold like that. This made it difficult to perform the different gestures which indicated that the design was very important for the understanding of the possible use patterns of the device.

The eMote II was much smaller and had more sensitive measuring technology in it. In addition to that Bent Oslo refined and developed the gesture recognition software to add more possible gestures. The design suggested that it was something different than a usual remote control and the ergonimics of the design placed it nicely in the hand which made physical gestures more natural than the former eMote I.

The eMote3D was made to experiment with and test the eMote II. Bent Oslo, Bent Guldbjerg and I wanted to confront a 3D interface with spatial gesture interaction via the eMote. Bent Guldbjerg programmed a connection between my 3D sitemap and the newest version of Bent Oslo's eMote software. We mapped seven different gestures to the 3D interface. The setup worked really well and it was a great first step towards discussing how to map functions through gestures and the number of gestures one can remember. We will develop this prototype further but one can get a pretty good idea of the functionalities in this video (7mb)