Dynamic and Constraint-based building of Ambient Applications with Self-Reflective Smart Objects

The increasing availability of novel smart objects in the Internet of Things offers exciting possibilities for a plethora of use cases. Smart environments support the interaction with and control of wirelessly interconnected devices, escaping the boundaries of current limited human computer interaction and enabling natural ambient interaction in smart environments. This opportunity on the other hand also creates new challenges for the user, who is faced with potential overload due to the need of starting, configuring, interconnecting, and using device ensembles in an appropriate and convenient way. In this paper, we contribute a novel approach for the automatic formation of appropriate ensembles of input and output devices to be used for novel ambient applications on- the-fly. We present a Fusion Engine as an extension of our Ambient Reflection Framework, which supports the dynamic and constrained-based setup of device ensembles by orchestrating a set of self-describing smart objects. The fusion takes into account the semantic information of applications, the services offered by smart objects and the physical constraints, users might face. We also discuss, how this process can be used to enable device ensembles to dynamically explain their functionality and interaction capabilities themselves to the user.