Enhancing interaction with smart objects through mobile devices

Abstract

Interaction with smart objects can be accomplished with different technologies, such as tangible interfaces or touch computing, among others. Some of them require the object to be especially designed to be'smart', and some other are limited in the variety and complexity of the possible actions. This paper describes a user-smart object interaction model and prototype based on the well known event-conditionaction (ECA) reasoning, which can work, to a degree, independently of the intelligence embedded into the smart object. It has been designed for mobile devices to act as mediators between users and smart objects and provides an intuitive means for personalization of object's behavior. When the user is close to an object, this one publishes its'event & action'capabilities to the user's device. The user may accept the object's module offering, which will enable him to configure and control that object, but also its actions with respect to other elements of the environment or the virtual world. The modular ECA interaction model facilitates the integration of different types of objects in a smart space, giving the user full control of their capabilities and facilitating creative mashuping to build customized functionalities that combine physical and virtual actions. Copyright 2011 ACM.