3DSim: Rapid prototyping ambient intelligence

The present paper introduces 3DSim, a tool for rapid prototyping Ambient Intelligence applications. A major feature of this work is the use of a 3D-based virtual environment to represent an intelligent meeting space allowing for prototyping a number of components such as lights, blinds, SMART BoardsTM, large display walls, projectors, aware chairs and humans as well as human activity animation. As a result of using standardized interfaces, any UPnP control point can be used to invoke actions on virtual UPnP devices. Such devices are dynamically inserted to the environment and can be removed at run-time. Data delivered by sensors is interpreted by an environment monitoring component which routes higher-level atomic context information to virtual objects. As a result of invoked device actions and gathered context information, resulting state changes (e.g. switching light states) are visualized within the scene. After introducing use cases and functional description of 3DSim, the present paper describes the underlying architecture and finally discusses future work and additional use cases for 3DSim.