Visualization and interaction of pervasive services using context-aware augmented reality

Pervasive, context-aware computing is a vision of our future computing lifestyle in which computer systems seamlessly integrate into our everyday lives, providing services and information in anywhere and anytime fashion. Augmented reality (AR) can naturally complement pervasive computing by providing an intuitive and interactive interface to a three-dimensional information space embedded within physical reality. This paper presents a new approach to supporting context-aware and adaptable visualization and interaction of pervasive services by combining context awareness with augmented reality. The framework utilizes AR for providing immersive and interactive visualization and interaction by embedding virtual models onto physical environments, which realizes bi-augmentation between physical and virtual spaces. It also offers a context-aware and adaptable service module to acquire, interpret and reason context information for context adaptable visualization. In particular, the module considers user preferences, device profiles, and security for providing users with higher levels of personalization that capture different elements of user contexts. The proposed approach has been successfully applied to various pervasive applications such as ubiquitous home, ubiquitous car, and ubiquitous engineering collaboration, which shows the effectiveness and novelty of the proposed approach.