Spatial zones of influence

ABSTRACT

Built with networked embedded systems technology, everyday objects like appliances, tools and environnments -- in general: "Digital Artefacts" -- become increasingly interconnected, diverse and heterogeneous, raising the challenge of an operative, and semantically meaningful interplay among each other. One approach to address this challenge is to design and implement systems able to "manage" and to "organize" themselves. Self-management stands for the ability of single Digital Artefact to describe itself, to select and use adequate sensors to capture information, and to describe its context. Self-organizing stands for the ability of a group of possibly heterogeneous digital artefacts to establish a spontaneous network based on interest, purpose or goal, and to negotiating and fulfilling a group goal. Thus, while self-management relates to individual artefacts, and concerns adaptation to changing individual goals and conditions at runtime, self-organization relates to whole ensembles, and concerns adaptation in order to meet group goals.

This presentation will address the issue of spatially constrained spontaneous interaction among Digital Artefacts. An explicit model for spatial proximity is investigated based on geometric descriptions of "Zones of Influence" (ZoI) of artefacts, enabling the triggering of their interactions based on real time verification of relations among ZoIs (intersection, inclusion). Once in spatial proximity to each other, verified by e.g. colliding ZoIs, artefacts coordinate their activities based on the exchange and analysis of self descriptions in metadata format. Self descriptions are encoded in a profile description language, expressing role, preferences, intent and goals of an artefact with respect to the particular context in which an interaction is attempted (like time, geoposition, relative position and orientation, environmental conditions, etc.). I will present the Peer-it platform, able to sense the context of a Digital Artefact, particularly its absolute and relative position and orientation. Together with the ability to exchange self descriptions and ZoIs via wireless communication, the Peer-it technology opens the road towards spatially aware digital artefacts.