"The wheel" - An innovative visual model for interacting with a social web of things

Thanks to the evolution of identification and empowering technologies, interconnected and intelligent things are becoming popular in many domains. Depending on the kind of service smart things can offer, the possibility to identify and exchange services with them arises the significant problem of how users should interact and communicate with things themselves. It is therefore important to provide a proper interaction model, in order to help users in establishing a correct dialogue with empowered objects of the real world. Nevertheless, very little attention has been dedicated to the conceptualization of a good human-smart object interaction model and of an innovative visualization technique for networks of smart connected objects. In this paper we therefore present The Wheel, an interaction concept developed for WantEat suit of applications, designed to support the visualization and the exploration of identifiable things of the real world and their connections with other things. We propose a paradigm that enables a personalized, social and serendipitous interaction with networked things, allowing a continuos transition between real and digital world.