PECO: 3D based interaction with a UPNP meeting room

Current paper presents the PECo system, a Personal Environment Controller. The aim of PECo is to provide an integrated and intuitive access to the user's personal environment and media repositories. Up to now, the human has to deal with complicated user interfaces. Existing user interfaces for intelligent environments enforce the user to intensively interact with the system and to have deep knowledge of the room's technical infrastructure organization, e.g. IP adresses, device IDs etc. Even if the user needs access both to virtual items (such as personal media) and physical devices at the same time, most of these control solutions do not offer an integrated and unified access. As a result of this user interface weaknesses, available infrastructure and technology become effectively useless. With the PECo [1,2] system, we address mentioned challenges and provide a novel interaction metaphor to access and manage intelligent environments. PECo uses an automatically created 3D visualization of the environment. Entering a room, PECo discovers the infrastructure and available devices and constructs the integrated user interface. The 3D Visualization makes a direct link between physical devices and their virtual representations on the user's PDA. So the user can just identify a device within his environment based on its position, orientation and form. Then he can access identified devices through the 3D interface and directly manipulate them. For example he can just click on a 3D object to turn on a light. The 3D Interface allows the user to access the infrastructure without having knowledge about specific device names, IP-Numbers, URLs etc. With the demonstration system described, a user with a PDA can remotely control appliances in a conferencing room, such as media visualisation infrastructure, complex lighting control, window shutters as well as the video conferencing system. Via a video streaming system, the user can observe the results of his interaction.