Real + virtual = clever: thoughts on programming smart environments

Abstract

Event-based communications has been used successfully in many application domains, one of which is virtual environments. Events are a useful concept in this context because they embody the notion of something happening in an environment, be it real or virtual. We claim that the notion of events is not only a suitable communications paradigm to model purely virtual environments but that it can also be used to interface an area in a real environment with a corresponding area in a virtual environment by relaying events in both directions. This idea, in turn, could turn out useful as a programming model for smart environments. As part of our recent work in distributed event systems for virtual world support, we have implemented an event model called ECO and used it to build a virtual model of a real world environment. In this position paper, we describe how such a virtual environment can be interfaced to its real world counterpart. We argue that this technology is promising as a way of programming smart environments because it maps naturally onto the application domain and simpli es the programming of such environments. To support this view, we present some examples of functionality often found in smart environments and explain how they can be programmed with the technology presented in this paper.