A gateway concept for visual exploration and control of building services

Assistance Systems employing for example interactive control of building environments and indoor localisation services are topics of growing relevance both in research and industry. Today there exist already a variety of indoor localisation approaches and systems as well as universal remote control systems. We report on our research on middleware which offers a position related smart building services gateway for visual- and contextual information exchange and for control. Such a system provides for example a user handheld device with location based visual building information. This information comprises 2D/3D maps of the building as well as information on available automation devices and other services. The data is updated by position- and state information submitted for example by automation devices, information services or an indoor localisation system. The obvious advantage of employing such a gateway middleware is the abstraction and the integration of the underlying systems, for example the localisation technology, or the original 3D building model data format, and the integration of existing control applications.