Indoor Positioning and The Home

I. How to achieve indoor/outdoor positioning

A. Cyber Guide
1. Uses Remote Controls mounted in ceiling of GVU, they transmit IR signals which are captured by the Newton , which then interprets them. Connected to each Newton, is an IR receiver and associated electronics.

2. This is one possible architecture for cases where you are assuming that people are going to have some computational device on them, in this case the newton.

B. ????
1. Another possible architecture is to have IR emmiters carried by occupants and have mounted IR recievers hooked up to some central computing resource which would then forward position info to any appliances which may want to act upon it.

2. This could be applied to the MUD paradigm

3. Could these IR emmiters be embedded in our clothes?

C. Indoor GPS: Anyone heard of this?

D. Non-Intrusive Techniques

1. MIT Media Lab: Basic approach is cameras, bar codes, and computer vision?

2. Xerox Parc: Idea of smart badges, which identified you to a room. Could open doors for you. Used a transceiver which handled communications between the device carried by the user and the underlying network. Each had range ~20 feet.

II. What can we do with this capability in the home?

A. Automatic light control, conserves power

B. By monitoring who is where when, the house could be trained to respond appropriately to usage patterns

C. Context-Aware Remote Control

D. Keeping track of the kids

III. Beyond positioning?

A. Facial Expression recognition.

B. Gesture recognition.

C. Action recognition.

IV.