U-TOPIA: A Ubiquitous Environment with a Wearable Platform, UFC and Its Security Infrastructure, pKASSO

U-TOPIA, introduced in this paper, is an advanced ubiquitous computing environment mainly focusing on a university campus. Research in U-TOPIA spans various components each of which is essential to realize U-TOPIA: from user device hardware/software, user interface, communication technology, indoor/outdoor testbed, middleware to practical applications and security infrastructure. We designed and implemented a wearable platform from the scratch and make use of it as a main user device inside U-TOPIA. In addition to this, as a new user interface, we developed a wireless gesture recognition device, called i-Throw to communicate with U-TOPIA in an intuitive manner. For data communication and location tracking in U-TOPIA, campus-wide indoor and outdoor testbed was deployed. To keep up with secure and dynamic U-TOPIA environment, a new security infrastructure,called pKASSO, and extensible middleware, μ-ware, was developed. Finally, as a practical application for U-TOPIA, we implemented a ubiquitous testbed room where multiple users interact with various ubiquitous devices or other users securely in a user-friendly manner. Integrating these components all together, we show that U-TOPIA can be a realistic role model to improve current paradigm of ubiquitous computing environment one step forward within a few years.