Enabling ubiquitous interaction with smart things

Within the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Things (STs) promise to permeate all contexts of daily life, offering digital access to their physical functionality. Mobile users then would be able to ubiquitously and spontaneously interact with things they encounter, enabling a wealth of diverse usage scenarios and applications. Currently, however, ST interaction requires a pre-controlled Internet or network connection as well as the prior installation of the ST-specific interaction interface, i.e., smartphone app. Users can thus only interact with known things, in contrast to the vision of spontaneous, ubiquitous discovery and interaction. We thus propose STIF (Smart Things Interaction Framework), enabling local wireless discovery of STs spontaneously via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, Visible Light Communication, or Acoustic Communication. STIF allows STs to transmit their interaction interface directly to users and supports interaction based on user input via touch and AR GUIs as well as motion and speech recognition. We implement STIF for Android phones as well as Arduino and Raspberry Pi things and demonstrate the real-life applicability of the supported communication and interaction techniques.