Seamless integration of output devices in intelligent environments: Infrastructure, strategies and implemeentation

We present a novel software infrastructure for the seamless integration of heterogeneous output devices into intelligent environments. It dynamically coordinates the output devices to enable adaptive, multimedia presentations by taking the availability of resources and the context of the presentation into account. In this paper we focus on three topics. We present our connecting middleware which supports ad-hoc spontaneous interactions between heterogeneous devices connected by different types of networks. We focus on the multimedia output (MMO) channel which is situated atop this middleware and which is responsible for coordinating output devices according to their self-descriptions. Then we give details about the AI planner which is used by the MMO channel to compute a solution to the presentation problem given by the presentation context. Finally, we outline our implementations for an intelligent living room scenario and point out related work