Managing Augmented Toy Environments - A New Perspective for Smart Space 
Management 

Steve Hinske and Marc Langheinrich Institute for Pervasive Computing, ETH 
Zurich, Clausiusstr. 59, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland {steve.hinske, 
marc.langheinrich}@inf.ethz.ch 

Smart environments have been a popular and well-investigated research topic 
during the last decade. The focus of this research, however, has mostly been 
on technologies and possible applications, while the management of such 
environments has rather been of secondary importance. In this paper we present 
our current work-in-progress to manage complex smart environments based on the 
example of the Augmented Knights Castle, a play set equipped with pervasive 
computing technologies. We describe and investigate the challenges that such 
an environment inherently poses regarding the aspect of management, and 
discuss our approach towards surmounting these challenges.