Smart hyperspaces and project Ubikids

A smart space is an electronics-enhanced physical environment that can sense the existence of users and other entities, and provide them the right services, in the right way, at the right time. Such senses and services are based on collaborative work of many interconnected devices and computers, which may be small enough to be embedded to everyday objects in the space. So far, many creative researches have been conducted to develop and experiment a variety of smart spaces. The next research issue to emerge, we believe, is to interconnect and integrate these isolated smart spaces together into a higher level space known as a hyperspace. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the smart space concepts and related research, we describe what a smart hyperspace is all about and what related challenging issues exist. We then explain our vision and motivations towards building a specific smart hyperspace, called Ubikids, to assist parents and provide services to make them more convenient, prompt, reliable, precise, and can remotely take care of their kids. Finally, we show the fundamental approaches, conceptual designs, crucial problems and so on, regarding the project Ubikids.