The Sentient Visor: Towards a Browser for the Internet of Things

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing adjunct publication - UbiComp '13 Adjunct, 2013

Supporting human users when interacting with smart devices is important to drive the successful adoption of the Internet of Things in people's homes and at their workplaces. In this poster contribution, we present a system that helps users control Web-enabled smart things in their environment. Our approach involves a handheld interaction device that recognizes smart things in its view using state-of-the-art visual object recognition techniques. It then augments the camera feed with appropriate interaction primitives such as knobs or buttons for control, and can also display measured values, for instance, when recognizing a sensor. The interaction primitives are generated from user interface descriptions that are embedded in the Web representations of the smart things. Our prototype implementation achieves frame rates that allow for interactive use of the system by human users, and indeed proved to facilitate the interaction with smart things in a demonstration testbed in our research group.

— The Internet of Things (IoT) includes many applications, frameworks and protocols that are specific to the types or categories of devices that are controlled. The web browser represents a widely used and available interface to access functionality and is present in most mobile devices. In this paper we present an integrated interface to control IoT connected devices through the medium of the web browser. We describe a lightweight method to integrate an IoT interface with a web browser with the help of various REST APIs and wrapper functions. We use features and technologies specific to the browser, such as bookmarks, authentication and offline mode to control devices directly through the browser instead of going through a centralized server. Our solution will enable any user to easily control any connected smart device via a web browser. We also describe the architecture of an EEG controlled IoT interface for the web browser.

2009

In the last few years the web has evolved from just being a source of information to a platform for business applications. In parallel to this, wireless sensor network technologies have evolved to a stage where they are capable of connecting to the web. This amalgamation of technologies referred to as "Web of Things", has created new opportunities for intelligent application development. However, the "Web of Things" has brought interesting challenges like-efficiently utilizing online sensors, sensor composition for just in time application development and others that require urgent attention. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework and reference architecture for embedding the notions of Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing within the "Web of Things" and empowering their use in a broader context.

Mobile Information Systems, 2017

Mobile computing and positioning technology merge physical and virtual reality. This hybrid space requires us to look beyond conventional interface designs in search of new forms of interaction that will work in open-ended systems. In contrast to the safety of the virtual desktop, physical reality is open-ended. Challenges to the design of an interface that must function in a constantly changing world involve practical issues and defining new conceptual models of interaction. The practical, low resolution on visual displays with animation may be a viable solution to changing resolution, distortions, and scattered user attention. The conceptual approach taken is to avoid unnecessary encodings in the interface and instead build on causal relations between the interface and the immediate environment whenever possible.

Workshop on Visual …, 2011

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.

Wisdom Web of Things, 2016

Computers are getting smaller, cheaper, faster, with lower power requirements, more memory capacity, better connectivity, and are increasingly distributed. Accordingly, smartphones became more of a commodity worldwide, and the use of smartphones as a platform for ubiquitous computing is promising. Nevertheless, we still lack much of the architecture and service infrastructure we will need to transition computers to become situation aware to a similar extent that humans are. Our Everything is Alive (EiA) project illustrates an integrated approach to fill in the void with a broad scope of works encompassing Ubiquitous Intelligence (RFID, spatial searchbot, etc.), Cyber-Individual (virtual world, 3D modeling, etc.), Brain Informatics (psychological experiments, computational neuroscience, etc.), and Web Intelligence (ontology, workflow, etc.). In this paper, we describe the vision and architecture for a future where smart real-world objects dynamically discover and interact with other real or virtual objects, humans or virtual human. We also discuss how the vision in EiA fits into a seamless data cycle like the one proposed in the Wisdom Web of Things (W2T), where data circulate through things, data, information, knowledge, wisdom, services, and humans. Various open research issues related to internal computer representations needed to model real or virtual worlds are identified, and challenges of using those representations to generate visualizations in a virtual world and of "parsing" the real world to recognize and record these data structures are also discussed.

By acquiring and reasoning about user and environmental context, Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems enable intelligent and intuitive interactions between people and their physical environments. AmI traditionally seeks to build on ubiquitous sensing technologies and communications to acheive this aim. Over a decade later, people are frequently immersed in or engaged with alternative, software, environments, such as those provided as web applications or social networks. Now, to form more complete contextual representations of users, AmI solutions require the context of multiple environments in which users may be immersed. This paper proposes a middleware supported framework for cyber-physical-social AmI that relies on the combined efforts of modern web technologies and ubiquitous computing as the enabling technologies.

2004

In a project to collect medical data from devices in wearables, the contextual information is essential for use by medics in interpreting the data. We have developed a portal which provides interactive access to the state and context of the devices and to the information collected. The portal is based on a MUD, which provides an appropriate spatial metaphor to reflect the context in the physical world.

2010 8th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2010

We are witnessing a tremendous hype on the Internet of Things paradigm, with not only research projects, but also commercial products claiming to implement its fundamental mechanisms. Smart-connected-objects designers often have to face decisions on the global architecture of the service, since no single solution is valid for all the cases. In this paper, we explore the different criteria for designing architectures for Internet of Things solutions, along with illustrative examples of prototypes that implement these approaches.