Precis of the MIT AI Lab Intelligent Room Project

Objective

The Intelligent Room project explores advanced human-computer interaction and collaboration technologies. The objective is to create an intelligent room capable of interpreting and augmenting activity occurring within it. The Intelligent Room should let people move about, talk to it and gesture while all the time perceiving personalized displays on their glasses and commanding a vast array of computational and communication resources without even thinking about it---instead occupants should be concentrating on solving real problems, such as distributed and collaborative planning and rehearsal in a variety of domains, e.g., trauma care, crisis management, rapid response deployment, and large-scale design.

Approach

The MIT AI Lab has developed a number of technologies in robotics, computer vision, natural language understanding, and intelligent information handling. Our approach is to leverage these technologies to achieve the objective of a seamless human-computer interface. The project has three major aspects which work together to provide a substrate for many different applications.
  1. The room has presentation and perceptual capabilities to interact with and understand its human occupants. This involves visual tracking of the occupants, gesture understanding, and personalized displays that "enhance reality" by keying computer-generated graphics and text to objects and locations in the room.
  2. There is a set of customizable intelligent agents which can autonomously navigate the WWW to retrieve information or to provide computational services to the room in an invisible and seamless fashion.
  3. There is a set of customizable intelligent systems which together orchestrate the interactions of the room, the people, and the WWW, keeping a repository of data, plans, etc., in a persistent database.
Last updated: May 8, 1996
pook@ai.mit.edu