Augmented Virtual Reality: Combining Crowd Sensing and Social Data Mining with Large-Scale Simulation Using Mobile Agents for Future Smart Cities

Abstract

Augmented reality is well known for extending the real world by adding computer-generated perceptual information and overlaid sensory information. In contrast, simulation worlds are commonly closed and rely on artificial sensory information generated by the simulator program or using data collected off-line. In this work, a new simulation paradigm is introduced, providing augmented virtuality by integrating crowd sensing and social data mining in simulation worlds by using mobile agents. The simulation world interacts with real world environments, humans, machines, and other virtual worlds in real-time. Mobile agents are closely related to bots that can interact with humans via chat blogs. Among the mining of physical sensors (temperature, motion, position, light, …), mobile agents can perform Crowd Sensing by participating in question–answer dialogs via a chat blog provided by a WEB App that can be used by the masses. Additionally, mobile agents can act as virtual sensors (offering data exchanged with other agents). Virtual sensors are sensor aggregators performing sensor fusion in a spatially region.