Repository | Book | Chapter

Designing responsive environments for various venues has become trendy today. Museums wish to create attractive "hands-on" exhibits that can engage and interest their visitors. Several research groups are building an "aware home" that can assist elderly people or chronic patients to have an autonomous life, while still calling for or providing immediate assistance when needed.The design of these smart spaces needs to respond to several criteria. Their main feature is to allow people to freely move in them. Whether they are navigating a 3D world or demanding assistance, we can't strap users with encumbering sensors and limiting tethers to make them interact with the space. Natural interaction, based on people's spontaneous gestures, movements and behaviors is an essential requirement of intelligent spaces. Capturing the user's natural input and triggering a corresponding action is however, in many cases, not sufficient to ensure the appropriate response by the system. We need to be able to interpret the users' actions in context and communicate to people information that is relevant to them, appropriate to the situation, and adequately articulated (simple or complex) at the right time.

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-89024-1_32

Full citation: