ABng presentation (~100MB mpeg)

Active Badge next generation (ABng) is a new, CORBA-compliant implementation of the Active Badge System developed at Computer Science Department, UMM, Poland. The original Active Badge System was created at Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory (ORL) in Cambridge, UK in 1989-92. ABng allows to locate people and equipment within a building determining the location of their Active Badges. These small devices worn by personnel and attached to equipment periodically transmit infra-red signals. Offices in the building are equipped with sensors which detect these signals. The location of the badge (and hence its wearer) can thus be determined on the basis of information provided by these sensors. This task is performed by the ABng software layer developed using modern object-oriented distributed programming environments compliant with the widely accepted Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard. It was developed for two CORBA implementations: OmniORB and Orbix. Information gathered by ABng is provided to various applications, such as viewers which display information about current location of people or equipment, and systems which control users' home and office appliances and thus enable to personalise users' environments.