Interactive application of a virtual smart home

Abstract

Smart Homes confront many challenges trying to move from vision to reality. Poor understanding of the concept of Smart Homes by both designers and end users causes many challenges in accepting smart homes by public. To overcome this problem, user participation in Smart Home design is advocated. On the other hand, there are no sufficient tools to design and represent real usage of smart spaces. Most BIM (Building Information Modeling) systems are lack of information needed in order to create a virtual environment which can interact with users. Filling this gap, we develop an application called VR Smart Home which supports: 1. Visualizing smart technologies, 2. Performing real-time interactions and tasks by users. The application presents a virtual smart home consisting of several smart technologies which can react to user interactions. The created virtual space in this application is different from conventional 3D space and has the capability of doing certain functions and reacting toward users’ interaction. The application utilizes three typical domestic tasks and several real-time interactions. Scripting the tasks makes the real-time interactions and system reactions possible. Accordingly, users can explore three predefined tasked named, cooking, working and contemplation inside the Virtual Smart Home on a touch screen LCD. The results from the first evaluations of the application reveal a positive attitude of users. They prove that when the users can directly execute a task in the virtual model, they can deliver a better comprehension of how smart technologies can be utilized. Hence, the application can be used as a toolset to improve communications among users and designers in the design processes of smart environments. Eventually, it can help designers to match the smart technology usability with users' demands

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