Designing the Interactive Architecture Space: A System for Designing and Interacting with Appliances in Interactive Architecture Indoor Sensing Environment.

Due to rapid developments in computation, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and engineering, and the architectural environment, the line between the physical and the digital world is increasingly blurred. Our physical spaces can now become more intelligent: receptive, perceptive, reactive, interactive, and even proactive in its responses to human occupants. In practice, however, achieving these reactive spaces is challenging. They require complex and integrated systems for sensing occupants’ status, activities, interactions to provide contextual information as inputs. This is further compounded by the diversity of appliances and applications that could be integrated sensing system to create outputs and effects in the environment. The technical complexity involved makes the development of such environments expensive in time and effort, and challenged by extensibility and expandability. This also creates significant barriers for non-technical experts, i.e. designers and architects, to participate in the preparation of interactive spaces. In this thesis, I present an indoor context sensing system that can gather, analyze and fuse the occupants’ movement, gestures and voice data. It also provides easy-to-use templates and rules for designers and developers to quickly integrate smart appliances and apply rules for easily configuration of these appliances. Finally, I demonstrate the potential of the system as a toolkit for rapid prototyping of interactive environments in two major domains - smart home context and new-media installations. The system, including software and hardware components, is packaged and well-documented, serving as an off-the-shelf, open-source project for developing interactive, intelligent environments.