H-Env: An architecture to create intelligent hyper-environments using ubiquitous computing and virtual reality

Ubiquitous computing is considered by many the grand challenge of the moment because of the different kinds of computational problems that it presents. Several works to build intelligent ubiquitous environments, that offer interaction with real world devices to the user in a straightforward way, have been proposed. In this work however we present an architecture, the H-Env, that extend this idea by adding the possibility to create and link many intelligent environments, either virtual or real making it possible to even mix them, offering a system that works not only with the real world entities, but also with virtual entities, thus resulting in a different and interesting form of interactivity. Our architecture seems to be a powerful tool to create pervasive games thanks to his inherent crossmedia aspect. The following paper describes the main idea behind the architecture. It then presents a validation of the already implemented part of the architecture which is the virtual environment module. The tests was performed using different sceneries, including high complexity CAD models.