Real time inspection of hidden worlds

"Smart Things" are commonly understood as wireless ad-hoc networked, mobile, autonomous, special purpose computing appliances, usually interacting with their environment implicitly via a variety of sensors on the input side and actuators on the output side. Such smart appliances have started to populate the "real world" with "hidden" or "invisible" services, thus building up an "invisible world" of services associated with real world objects. With the embedding of invisible technology into everyday things, however, also the intuitive perception of "invisible services" disappears. We believe that it has potential advantages to support the perception of smart appliance services via novel interactive visual experiences. For this purpose we have developed and built DigiScope, a see-through based visual real time perception system for "invisible worlds" to support interactive theater experience in mixed reality spaces. A case study is presented that demonstrates the use of DigiScope to percept the "invisible services" of our smart Internet appliance SmartCase. Opposed to previous work on mixed reality based augmentation of reality, the DigiScope approach allows for a multiuser, collaborative real time perceptual experience.