Ambient Intelligence > Research

Overview

The Ambient Intelligence Group develops intelligent environments, smart interaction objects and attentive systems with a focus on continuous interaction, multimodal display & sensing and a coherent link between modalities, for useful and helpful applications that serve a positive humanitarian purpose. We aim at implicit, peripheral (sometimes even subliminal), functional (but also aesthetic) multimodal cues that enhance tool use, communication and interaction with smart environments while being calm and unobtrusive and thereby also suited for casual usage.

Our focus lies on the (mostly) non-robotic types of interfaces: we address the question how everyday artefacts – be they passive such as a chair or a golf club or electronic such as drilling machines, mobile phones or even keyboards – can be extended with sensors/actuators and computing nodes, to support users or to enable innovative ways of interacting with each other or with the (either real or digital) environment.

From our point of view, it is only one particular view on cognitive interaction technology 'to endow technical systems with the computational complexity to cope with the complex information as they occur in biological systems/brains'. A second and different, yet also attractive perspective is to innovate systems in their modes of interacting with users so that a seamless, intuitive and effective total performance or interaction quality is reached. For this we look at systems and humans as mutually dependent and we aim at a productive symbiosis or cooperation.

Group activies fall into these three categories:

• Ambient Interfaces – Creating unobtrusive ways to interact with technology.
• Mixed and Augmented Reality – Blending the virtual and the real world.
• Sonification – Using audio to understand and communicate data.