3D virtual "smart home" user interface

In contrast to the rapid development of home automation equipment and 'smart home' capabilities, comparatively less attention has been paid to the development of comprehensive, comfortable and self-explaining user interfaces. This is acknowledged to be an important obstacle for the broad success of smart home ideas and products. In order to make home automation desirable and economically feasible, it is vital to improve the attractivity, intuitivity and adaptivity of the user-home interaction taking advantage from modem information technologies such as Virtual Reality technology and downloadable hypertext documents. The user interface is augmented by the use of a virtual environment in conjunction with the physical environment adding information from different systems and sensors in the home, based on virtual environment activities. In this paper we describe a powerful graphical interface created with standard 3D programming tools to control and supervise the household. A number of features implemented in a prototype and implementation aspects will be described.