Our everyday lives are increasingly pervaded by digital assistants and smart devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT). While user interfaces to directly monitor and control individual IoT devices are becoming more sophisticated and end-user friendly, applications to connect standalone IoT devices and create more complex IoT processes for automating and assisting users with repetitive tasks still require a high level of technical expertise and programming knowledge. Related approaches for process modelling in IoT mostly suggest extensions to complex modelling languages, require high levels of abstraction and technical knowledge, and rely on unintuitive tools. We present a novel approach for end-user oriented-no-code-IoT process modelling using Mixed Reality (MR) technology: HoloFlows. Users are able to explore the IoT environment and model processes among sensors and actuators as first-class citizens by simply “drawing” virtual wires among physical IoT devices. MR technology hereby facilitates the understanding of the physical contexts and relations among the IoT devices and provides a new and more intuitive way of modelling IoT processes. The results of a user study comparing HoloFlows with classical modelling approaches show an increased user experience and decrease in required modelling knowledge and technical expertise to create IoT processes.

构成物联网（IoT）的数字助理和智能设备日益普及我们的日常生活。虽然直接监视和控制单个IoT设备的用户界面变得越来越复杂并且对最终用户友好，但是连接独立的IoT设备并创建更复杂的IoT流程以自动化和协助用户执行重复任务的应用程序仍然需要高水平的技术知识和编程知识。物联网中流程建模的相关方法大多建议扩展到复杂的建模语言，需要高水平的抽象和技术知识，并依赖于不直观的工具。我们为使用混合现实（MR）技术的面向最终用户的无代码IoT过程建模提供了一种新颖的方法：HoloFlows。用户只需在物理IoT设备之间“绘制”虚拟线路，就可以探索作为一流公民的传感器和执行器之间的IoT环境和流程模型。因此，MR技术促进了对物联网设备之间物理环境和关系的理解，并提供了一种新的，更直观的物联网过程建模方法。用户研究的结果将HoloFlows与经典建模方法进行了比较，结果表明用户体验增加了，而创建物联网流程所需的建模知识和技术专长却减少了。