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Big displays and ultrawalls are increasingly present in nowadays environments (e.g. in city spaces, buildings, transportation means, teaching rooms, operation rooms, convention centres, etc.), at the same time that they are widely used as tools for collaborative work, monitoring and control in many other contexts. How to enhance interaction with big displays to make it more natural and fluent is still an open challenge. This paper presents a system for multimodal interaction based on pointing and speech recognition. The system makes possible for the user to control the big display through a combination of pointing gestures and a set of control commands built on a predefined vocabulary. The system is already prototyped and being used for service demonstrations for different applications.

Interaction with smart objects can be accomplished with different technologies, such as tangible interfaces or touch computing, among others. Some of them require the object to be especially designed to be 'smart', and some other are limited in the variety and complexity of the possible actions. This paper describes a user-smart object interaction model and prototype based on the well known event-condition-action (ECA) reasoning, which can work, to a degree, independently of the intelligence embedded into the smart object. It has been designed for mobile devices to act as mediators between users and smart objects and provides an intuitive means for personalization of object's behavior. When the user is close to an object, this one publishes its 'event & action' capabilities to the user's device. The user may accept the object's module offering, which will enable him to configure and control that object, but also its actions with respect to other elements of the environment or the virtual world. The modular ECA interaction model facilitates the integration of different types of objects in a smart space, giving the user full control of their capabilities and facilitating creative mash-uping to build customized functionalities that combine physical and virtual actions.