The Virtual Environment of Things (VEoT): A Framework for Integrating Smart Things into Networked Virtual Environments

The key concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is linking physical smart things to the Internet to make them active participants on the Internet. The Web of Things (WoT) uses the World Wide Web platform and its associated technologies as a framework to realize IoT. Inspired by WoT, we propose a new paradigm, the Virtual Environment of Things (VEoT), to integrate real-world smart things and virtual-world avatars/objects in a computer generated virtual environment so that entities in either worlds can interact with one another in a real-time manner. To prove the VEoT concept, we design a hierarchical smart gateway, REX (Resources Exchange), to embody smart things as Restful resources that can be combined with networked virtual environments (NVEs) to realize the integration and the interaction of the virtual environments and the real world. In addition, we implement a VEoT-based NVE, called X-Campus, for guiding visitors to navigate a building of National Central University to verify the feasibility of VEoT. This implementation shows the VEoT framework works properly.