Building data model and simulation platform for spatial interaction management in smart home

The complex and invisible services in smart home can lead to the difficulty in occupant role over the whole smart home life-cycle beginning from the design process to the occupancy stage. As any smart home will be eventually used by end users, providing a method to enhance user participation and user comprehension on how smart equipments and service will be installed as well as be operated is indispensable. Nonetheless, there is no research which applies the user-centered approach on the smart home design stage so far. This paper is focused on how to create and to implement virtual space using virtual reality technology as a platform to simulate smart home service configuration. A new framework comprises Spatial Context-aware Place Data Model, Place and Avatar Agents, and Web Service is firstly introduced in this paper. By means of context-aware building data model, human-space interaction which is vital for simulating smart home functions and services are realized in the virtual environment. Together with VR, the platform is capable of visualizing invisible services, performing real-time interactions with the home, and acknowledging the users how it can be configured and operated according to their individual needs. In addition, the web-based service increases the system accessibility and usability as users can log-in from anywhere to collaborate with each others. Because smart home is extremely difficult for users to gain insight of smart service configuration, our research position is to express a user-oriented approach by applying the concept of U-VR to smart home simulation model. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.