From Internet to Smart World

The development of informationization and intelligentization prompts Internet developing toward a new era. A deep fusion among cyber space, physical space, social space, and thinking space brings a quaternionic cyber-physical-social-thinking hyperspace, based on which an embryo of smart world is being established through heterogeneous spaces. The smart world is expected to be an attractive perspective involving ubiquitous sensing, computing, and communication to achieve comprehensive interconnections of physical perception, cyber interaction, social correlation, and cognitive thinking. In this paper, evolution of the smart world is briefly introduced, and physical-based coordination, social-inspired interactivity, brain-abstracted cooperativity, and cyber-enabled homogeneity are, respectively, discussed as the main characteristics of the smart world.