Spatial counterpart objects for intelligent environments

This paper presents a framework enabling communications between physical entities, e.g., people and everyday objects, smart objects, and places in intelligent environments. It provides such entities and places with virtual counterpart objects as their proxies and maintains the spatial relationships between them as hierarchical relations between their counterpart objects. It enables them to discover and communicate with their communication partners through their virtual counterpart objects according to their co-locations. This paper presents the design for this framework and describes its implementation and applications.