Augmented Worlds: a proposal for modelling and engineering pervasive mixed reality smart environments

In recent years, the remarkable technological advancement has revolutionised the ICT panorama offering nowadays the opportunity to exploit several technological convergences to reduce the gulf existing between the physical and the digital matter, between the physical real world and every computational software system or application. Along with Pervasive Computing - entered in the mainstream with the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) - Mixed Reality (MR) is going to be an essential ingredient for the design and development of next future smart environments. In particular, in such environments is feasible to imagine that the computation will drive the augmentation of the physical space, and software will also be executed in a cyber-physical world, eventually populated with of (interactive) holograms. After an initial exploration of the state of the art about augmentation technologies both for humans and the environment, in this dissertation we present the vision of Augmented Worlds (AW), a conceptual and a practical proposal for modelling and engineering next future pervasive mixed reality smart environments as distribute, multi-user and cooperative complex software systems. On the one hand, a meta-model is formalised and opportunely discussed to offer to the literature a conceptual tool for modelling AWs. On the other hand, also a concrete infrastructure - called MiRAgE - is designed and developed to produce a platform for engineering and deploy such innovative smart environments. The work carried out in this dissertation fits into the scientific literature and research of Pervasive Computing and Mixed Reality fields. Furthermore, part of the contribution is related also to the area of Cognitive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, due to the AWs orientation to be deeply connected to a layer involving autonomous agents able to observe and act proactively in the smart environment.