The Challenges and Solutions in Turning HCI from Desktop to Smart Spaces

Smart Spaces introduce new challenges to interface designers due to a number of differences from traditional desktopcomputing model, including multimodal interaction, context sensitive interaction, continuous interaction, dynamically focused interaction, physically embodied interaction and interaction based on dynamic set of device. This paper discusses these challenges and provides the solutions in our Smart Space system – Smart Classroom, an ongoing project in Tsinghua University. The system integrates dozens of hardware devices and several computer vision and speech recognition modules on an infrastructure, Smart Platform.