Section: New Results

Towards Metamorphic Housing: the on-demand room

Participant : Michele Dominici [contact] .

This research activity is supported by Fondation Rennes 1 through the chair "Smart Home and Innovation", since January 2014. This activity is centered on the concept of metamorphic housing (see section 4.2 ). During the first year, we had identified the goals of the research project, also taking into account the trends of future housing industry, provided by the enterprises and public authorities that support the chair. We also had identified a case study, the on-demand room, to be displayed as the main application of the research results in scientific communications and vulgarization. It consists in a space that is physically shared by a small group of apartments, but is assigned for the sole use of one or few particular ones at the time. The room is designed so as to make occupants feel they did not leave their apartment at all. They seamlessly move from their dwelling to the on-demand room and conversely, without noticing the difference, as the room adapts to their preferences. During 2015, second year of the chair, we organized our work following two main axes: (i) solving the research problems, illustrated in the rest of this section; (ii) demonstrating the results using mixed reality as combination of virtual reality and off-the-shelf domotic devices, described in section 6.2.2 .

The research problems underlying the on-demand room are numerous: we illustrated them in the research report "A Case Study of Metamorphic Housing: The on-Demand Room” [3] . We started by addressing the problems associated with the goal of "plugging” the room into different apartments. This requires to dynamically change the rights to control and customize the room's equipment, including lights, appliances, heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVAC), etc. This must be done in a transparent fashion, so that off-the-shelf devices and appliances can be used.

To solve these problems, we started a collaboration with the DIVERSE team (http://diverse.irisa.fr/ ). The goal is to use the Kevoree (http://kevoree.org/ ) software framework to dynamically reconfigure the networks and domotic system of the room and of the apartments. When the on-demand room is owned by an apartment, their computer networks are interconnected; appliances, sensors and controllers in the room and the apartment can communicate with each others; devices reflect user preferences. Kevoree will enable these reconfigurations by running on key appliances and dynamically adapting and customizing their behavior to the owner of the on-demand room.

As part of the collaboration, some research goals have already been identified. The underlying challenges will be addressed and the results will be integrated in a comprehensive mixed reality demonstrator. This will represent the final iteration of the ongoing demonstration process, illustrated in the platform section (for more details, see 6.2.2 ).