A typical office environment has been augmented with Ambient Intelligence technologies, demonstrating how these are seamlessly integrated into the everyday working environment in a technologically transparent way, in order to support everyday activities robustly and consistently.
The facilities that the AmI office features include:
- Informative Art Display for presenting dynamic information. For example, the office owner’s email account is being monitored and the painting “the Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli is augmented accordingly, by adding oranges to the tree for each message that has been received by a colleague, sharks circling Venus for virus-infected messages, floating tin cans for spam messages, etc.
- Interactive Deskpad, which can be used for everyday tasks such as reading email, delivering a presentation, or transferring and managing photos. The Deskpad works both as a single screen (e.g., Photo Manager) and dual screen (e.g., Email) output device, while it can also collaborate with surrounding displays, such as a large television monitor. The Deskpad supports both custom-made and commercial applications, such as web browsers, office applications, etc., and collaborates with RFID-augmented artifacts. For example, the office owner can initiate a PowerPoint presentation by placing on the Deskpad an RFID-augmented leaflet. Finally, the Deskpad supports both infrared pen and gesture-based interaction, allowing users to control for example the sound level of a video, or to navigate in a powerpoint presentation by using bare hands to perform the appropriate gestures.
- Photo Manager, allowing transfer of the user’s photos from a mobile phone just by placing the phone on the Deskpad, as well as easy photo manipulation and display migration with the use of an IR pen.
- Multi-display PowerPoint Presenter, exploiting the dual Deskpad screens for displaying the user’s presentation notes, supporting gesture navigation and allowing live annotations with the use of an IR pen.
- Multi-user collaboration on documents, featuring one personal area for each participant and one public area for public interest documents. The smart collaboration office feature allows easy viewing, duplication and sharing of any type of documents and supports concurrent multi-user interaction through various techniques and devices.
- Collaborative multi-player games for participants around the table.
