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Smartphones have a great potential as tools to adapt daily living spaces to the specific needs of its inhabitants. These devices usually host selected content, personal information and useful applications for their users, apart from continuously gath- ering their context data and preferences. Taking this fact as starting point, this paper describes PERSEO, a system that imple- ments a mobile-instrumented interaction concept to personalize the smart space by using a network of presence sensors and media objects. PERSEO is device-centric and relies on physical interaction. This means that on touch, grasp or proximity with any of the trigger objects in the presence network (e.g. NFC or Bluetooth enabled devices), the smartphone seamlessly transfers contents or application control to the available (media) objects, in order to improve the user experience. The transfer actions are governed by an event-condition-action logic that may be customized by the user in the smartphone. Actions depend on the iden- tification of the foreground applications running in the smartphone hosting PERSEO's logic. To enable the interaction concept, it has been necessary to design and implement a custom Digital Media Controller based on REST interfaces compatible with DLNA standard for media streaming. The paper explains the interaction flows and details the architecture components through an Android-based mobile prototype working in a smart living room. The system performance has been positively evaluated in terms of response time. Additionally, a group of users have tried PERSEO and favorably informed about this mobile-object instrumented personalization approach.

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.

Nowadays, the heterogeneity of interconnected things and communication technologies creates several small worlds composed of a single object and a smartphone. For each object, the user needs to download a specific application, search and connect the device. The result is a waste of valuable resources: several objects are able to communicate with the smartphone, but they cannot directly interact among them. In this paper, we propose a model that can be used to define a set of standard interfaces suitable for every smart object. Devices that adhere to the same model can be easily controlled and placed in relation among them, creating multi-object behaviors for a smart space. The smartphone is still a control center, but with a single application it is possible to control and personalize spaces in a holistic way, instead of using the traditional one-to-one approach. Moreover, personalization should be portable: it is desirable that a behavior works in as many smart spaces as possible, at least in a similar way as it does in the environment in which it was configured, freeing the user from the tedious task of adapting it manually every time s/he goes to another space. A portable personalization extends the bring your own device paradigm to a new “bring your own space” paradigm. The model is inspired in the object-oriented programming, reinterpreting features such as inheritance and polymorphism to the real world, so it is possible to provide a software system able to adapt existing behaviors to new spaces. The use of the model is exemplified in the paper with two examples of smart spaces.

Gestures contain enough information to distinguish a person from another. This ‘biometric’ feature is the basis of the Kinect-enabled system described in this paper, which is designed to identify a given person through a short chain of in-air gestures (2–3 ones). The user-dependent (trainable) system relies on a traditional Dynamic Time Warping classification algorithm. This core algorithm enhances its performance thanks to two filters (duration and sensitivity) that make the system more robust against the variability of the gestures from the same user among iterations (e.g. gestures may differ in duration and shape). The system includes a ‘point-based’ score strategy designed to rapidly discard the non-probable users and to speed up identity confirmation among the most probable candidates. Additionally, the system includes a specific component to guarantee the training quality. In order to integrate the identification process into a real service, the gesture chain is retrieved through a sequence of double-option questions that aim at better adapting a smart space (the lighting infrastructure and the available multimedia contents) to a given user depending on his specific needs. This way, the identification task remains in second plane, wrapped in functional questions. Ten users have tested the service, providing their positive feedback.

Augmented reality (AR) has become popular in the last few years thanks to the penetration of smartphones with AR browsers and applications. Nevertheless, mobile devices act as an imperfect virtual window, thus research is also exploring how to make AR systems wearable. In this direction, this paper describes a wearable system that uses projected interfaces and gesture-based interaction to enable an AR experience within a smart environment. It is composed of a Pico projector, a Raspberry Pi equipped both with WiFi and ZigBee interfaces and a handheld gesture detection device. Scattered in the environment, different Arduino objects with sensors and ZigBee connectivity capabilities propose projected services to nearby users. The system's architecture is detailed and exemplified with three types of objects: a navigation beacon, a smart plant pot and a game box.

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.