Smart Rooms
Alvin Chen, Richard R. Muntz, Mani B. Srivastava · S.M.A.R.T. environments · 2004
The focus and application of computing technology in the past has largely been on facilitating and enriching “person to computer” and “person to person” interactions. However, driven by relentlessly shrinking microelectronics, computing technology is undergoing a transformation whereby its primary role is shifting to enabling richer interaction between people and instrumented physical environments. Such technology promises to bring interaction and intelligence to commonplace inanimate objects in our environment, thus establishing “person to physical world” interaction as the new focus of computing technology. Perhaps the most successful manifestation of this new paradigm has been in the context of indoor spaces, such as rooms, which are instrumented to let the occupants of the physical space invisibly interact with the virtual world of computers as they go about their normal activities. In such “Smart Rooms,” various services residing in the underlying networked computing infrastructure continually observe and track what the occupants are doing via multiple sensor modalities, controlling actuators that modify the physical state of the room or provide other feedback to the occupants. In this chapter, we explore the goals, technology challenges, and operational constraints that characterize the smart room paradigm. From a technology perspective, we describe the networking, sensing, middleware services, and data management primitives that are essential for realizing a scalable infrastructure for deeply instrumented physical environments. Despite the growing range of applications available, we show that smart rooms face a common set of challenges in providing the intelligent computing environments of the future.