Ubi-Floor: Design and Pilot Implementation of an Interactive Floor System

Ubi-floor is designed as an interactive floor system which allows user to interact with a floor based smart environment. Concerning context aware floor system, previous researches typically dealt with simple ideas of using gate pattern recognition supported by piezoelectric sensing devices or personal identification mediated by body weight estimation that cannot fully support position dependent context-awareness not to mention interactive interfaces based on it. This paper describes the design and implementation of an interactive floor system that is capable of dealing with various context aware multimedia applications such as visual displays, floor based games, navigation through geographical maps and recording or playing video memo triggered by the menu selections through foot step tracking interface. In addition, this pilot system is recognized as a highly scalable modular prototype of an innovative digital floor system applicable to diversified ubiquitous environments. Furthermore, the system is likely to provide highly enhanced usability of a smart floor system largely affected by various applications that could be adopted. Our further study will include the integration of this ubi-floor platform with various applications in the domain of ubiquitous computing.