Natural interaction in intelligent spaces: Designing for architecture and entertainment
The rapid evolution of computers' processing power, progress in projection and display technology, and their low cost, accompanied by recent advances in mathematical modeling, make available to space designers today sophisticated technologies which were once accessible only to research institutions or large companies. Thanks to wireless sensing techniques it is possible to endow a space with perceptual intelligence, and make it aware of how people use it, move in it, or react to it. Intelligent Spaces are relevant for several applications or tasks which range from surveillance to entertainment, from medical rehabilitation to artistic performance, from museum exhibit design to commerce. The author's work focuses on Narrative Spaces which are storytellers, able to articulate an informative or entertaining audio-visual narration for people interactively. Narrative Spaces communicate by use of large scale coordinated projections, sounds and displays whose contents are choreographed by the natural body movements or physical gestures of the people in them. This paper describes the guiding principles and modeling approaches that, according to the author, enable a robust modeling of user input and communication strategies for digital content presentation in Intelligent Narrative Spaces. It then provides examples of applications built according to the specified criteria.
ambient intelligence intelligent architecture interactive spaces interactive entertainment