Browsing the Web of Connectable Things

As the number of Internet of Things devices continue to grow, a pattern of off-loading user control and interaction to individuals’ mobile devices has emerged. The user experience, however, is burdened by high-friction tasks, including device discovery, app installation, scanning, pairing, and configuration. Additionally, the tools and systems currently employed to facilitate interaction vary in degree of usefulness, provide inconsistent support, and fail to mesh together in a meaningful way. This user experience model scales poorly with the increasing population of “things”, and significantly hinders casual interactions with ambient devices, as well as regular interactions with persistent devices. To break away from this restrictive paradigm, we propose an architecture that provides a seamless, scalable approach to discovering and interacting with nearby “things” in both shortand long-term contexts. The system takes advantage of multiple network patterns and modern web technologies to supply users with rich device interfaces that can interact directly over local networking protocols. A mobile app-based implementation of this system is tested with several embedded wireless devices. In our analysis, we find that our method scales better than current popular models and that it enables powerful and complex functionality while remaining natural, intuitive, and secure for users.