Sim E
(Simulated EnvironMENT)
In order to demonstrate our system from data collection to building automation, we constructed two mini office dioramas named SimE (Simulated Environment). They help people experience the effects of our system at EXPE and understand our system much more intuitively than words can achieve.
The physical dioramas feature 4 individually controlled zones, each having a fan to represent ventilation control and LED strips that shine through the floor to represent the heating cooling through their colors. In addition, each zone also features LED ring lights that are analogous to the LED indicator lights on Aurora sensor boxes.
Interaction with the SimE is intuitive, visitors of our EXPE booth simply place various people shaped tokens within the office environment and see the system react via ventilation, air conditioning, and indicator light.
Instead of placing a camera in each zone within the SimE, we used one centrally mounted camera in the ceiling for presence accounting via a simple Camera Vision algorithm to detect the location of the tokens within SimE. The Camera is also able to visually detect the dividers between the rooms, thus the system is able to detect occupancy for each zone, and react accordingly.
