Intelligent Living Room

The residents of a house can use the living room not only as a traditional social and individual space where many activities take place, but also as a smart ecosystem.

The “Intelligent Living Room” is part of the “Intelligent Home” in-vitro simulation space located at the AmI Facility. The hardware facilities of the living room environment, which include both commercial equipment and technologically augmented custom-made objects:

  • SmartSofa – is a commercial sofa equipped with various sensors that assists the detection of user presence inside the room, and provides information regarding the user’s posture while seated
  • AugmenTable – a stylish commercial coffee table, which in addition to its intended use for placing objects on top of it, acts as a large projection area where secondary information can be presented from a projector embedded in the ceiling
  • AmITV – comprises of a 70-inch 4K smart TV and a software shell that can host and manipulate interactive applications
  • SurroundWall – comprises of a short-throw projector embedded in the ceiling above the TV. This installation transforms the wall around the TV into a secondary large display

Sophisticated software transforms the environment into a smart ecosystem that evolves around the needs of its users and acts in an appropriate manner when deemed necessary:

  • Entertainment Applications – applications similar to those offered by trending Smart TVs (i.e. movies, music, news, slideshow. These applications employ various contextual information (e.g. users’ preferences, habits, daily routine, location in space) to make informed decisions and intelligent recommendations to their users
  • CaLmi – a pervasive system that can be deployed in “Intelligent Environments” aiming to reduce the stress of the home inhabitants by activating ambient relaxation programs
  • ParlAmI – a conversational interface that communicates with the users in a natural manner and assists them throughout their daily activities (e.g. suggests home automation scenarios based on user monitoring, provides multimedia content recommendations, or stress reduction commands, or feedback for user actions)
  • Sportscaster – a media application designed to augment and enhance the sports viewing experience of a Champions League football (soccer) game. The primary screen, where the game is shown, is the TV that can display up to four matches in parallel. Mimicking the stadium videoboards, SurroundWall features UIs that present live information that varies depending on the context. In more details, before the beginning of the match, viewers can see the lineups, last matches form and Head-to-head statistics, while during the match the default displayed information includes live game details (e.g., score, time), player statistics (e.g., goals scored, cards), and social media feed. On key moments, such as penalties or free-kicks, SurroundWall is used to display complementary videos (e.g., a replay) or ask for user input (e.g., a poll regarding the VAR decision).
  • Netronio – an ambient entertainment system aiming to enhance UX while watching multimedia content such as movies or TV series. In addition to typical video player functionality (e.g., playback control), it exploits the Intelligent Living Room’s technological infrastructure in order to deliver -in a personalized manner according to the viewer’s preferences and past interactions- context-sensitive information relevant to the content they are currently watching, (e.g., if an individual is interested in movie soundtracks, then they will be made available automatically). Additionally, it relies on a movie-/episode- specific configuration (following the paradigm of external subtitles) in order to decide how to manipulate the environment so as to create appropriate conditions for enjoying the selected show (e.g., adjust the room’s lightning conditions, snooze notifications during key comments).

Publications

Leonidis, A., Korozi, M., Kouroumalis, V., Adamakis, E., Milathianakis, D. & Stephanidis, C. (2021). Going Beyond Second Screens: Applications for the Multi-display Intelligent Living Room. ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences

Sykianaki, E., Leonidis, A., Antona, M. and Stephanidis, C. (2019). CaLmi: Stress Management in Intelligent Homes. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2019 International Symposium on Wearable Computers Proceedings (UbiComp/ISWC'19). ACM, London, UK, 4 pages.

Stefanidi E.; Foukarakis M.; Arampatzis D.; Korozi M.; Leonidis A.; Antona M. (2019). ParlAmI: A Multimodal Approach for Programming Intelligent Environments. The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA). A special issue of Technologies (ISSN 2227-7080). Technologies 2019

Leonidis, A., Korozi, M., Kouroumalis, V., Poutouris, E., Stefanidi, E., Arampatzis, D., Sykianaki, E., Anyfantis, N., Kalligiannakis, E., Nicodemou, V. C., Stefanidi, Z., Adamakis, E., Stivaktakis, N., Envdaimon, T., Antona, M. (2019). Ambient Intelligence in the Living Room. Ambient Intelligence in the Living Room. Sensors 19, no. 22 (2019): 5011.

Anyfantis, Nikolaos, Evangelos Kalligiannakis, Achilleas Tsiolkas, Asterios Leonidis, Maria Korozi, Prodromos Lilitsis, Margherita Antona and Constantine Stephanidis. (2018). AmITV: Enhancing the Role of TV in Ambient Intelligence Environments.. PETRA (2018).

Stefanidi, E., Korozi, M., Leonidis, A., & Antona, M. (2018, June) (2018). Programming Intelligent Environments in Natural Language: An Extensible Interactive Approach. In Proceedings of the 11th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference (pp. 50-57). ACM.