We present a novel technique implementing barehanded interaction with virtual 3D content by employing a time-of-flight camera. The system improves on existing 3D multi-touch systems by working regardless of lighting conditions and supplying a working volume large enough for multiple users. Previous systems were limited either by environmental requirements, working volume, or computational resources necessary for realtime operation. By employing a time-of-flight camera, the system is capable of reliably recognizing gestures at the finger level in real-time at more than 50 fps with commodity computer hardware using our newly developed precision hand and finger-tracking algorithm. Building on this algorithm, the system performs gesture recognition with simple constraint modeling over statistical aggregations of the hand appearances in a working volume of more than 8 cubic meters. Two iterations of user tests were performed on a prototype system, demonstrating the feasibility and usability of the approach as well as providing first insights regarding the acceptance of true barehanded touch-based 3D interaction. INTRODUCTIONMulti-touch interaction techniques have become widely available recently, being used for instance in table top systems such as Microsoft's Surface [30] projection-based systems such as CityWall [24], desktop systems such as HP's TouchSmart series as well as in several mobile devices, in particular smartphones such as the Google Nexus and, of course, the iPhone. The introduction of multi-touch interaction techniques has probably been the most important change to user input since the introduction of the mouse.To date, multi-touch interaction typically is surface based. Selection of objects is required before actually manipulating them by touching the corresponding surface with the hands.Freehand multi-touch has been explored within various approaches, e.g. Oblong's g-speak 1 , after initially having been introduced in the popular Hollywood movie "Minority Report". They usually depended heavily on hand-worn gloves, markers, wrists, or other input devices, and typically did not achieve the intuitiveness, simplicity and efficiency of surface (2D) based multi-touch techniques 2 . In contrast to those approaches, the goal of our approach was to use barehanded interaction as a replacement for surface based interaction.Only a vision-based approach will allow for freehand and barehanded 3D multi-touch interaction. The system must also provide sufficient solutions for the following four steps: detection of hand position without prior knowledge of existence; for each appearance determine pose from image cues; track appearances over time; recognize gestures based on their trajectory and pose information. Various approaches exist to solve all four problems, each featuring different advantages and disadvantages.Barehanded 3D interaction has recently been presented by Mygestyk 3 and provides the basis for Microsoft's Kinect interface for Xbox 360 4 . However, these approaches are limited either to a sing...

To facilitate engineering and evolution of automation systems, ensuring the correctness of the design models is an important topic. Industrial automation systems are composed of various heterogeneous elements designed by different disciplines such as mechanical, electrical/electronic and software engineering. In this contribution, an approach for modeling industrial automation systems is presented which is based on interface behavior modeling of design artifacts and which supports automatic verification of their functional conformance while considering information from various disciplines.

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Smart energy systems seem a promising choice for countries worldwide to realign their power systems to the challenges predicted for the next decades. With the will to participate in this class of systems, many solution providers design custom systems, which sometimes consist of similar parts, but are on the contrary hard to compare to each other. However, a reference describing existing commonalities is needed as a basis for many activities such as regulation design, legislation, national discussion or standardization. This paper illustrates the challenges connected with the creation of reference architectures for smart energy systems, delineates their benefits and suggests a model and method for their incremental, bottom-up development and validation through concrete system architectures.Index Terms-Reference Architecture; Smart Energy Systems; Smart Grid; Ontologies; Conceptual Modeling; Domain Modeling; Bottom-up design; I. INTRODUCTIONThe existing energy systems will go through major changes within the next decades. Facts like the increasing of renewable, decentralized energy sources, the growing number of electric cars, national efforts on market liberalization and reduction of CO 2 -emissions, integration of different energy grid types (e.g. electric power, district heating or gas grids) or the need for advanced monitoring systems and increased power stability will drive this change. Many countries discuss new concepts to solve problems like the fluctuating supply of renewable energy with smart systems while having to ensure power stability.As a reaction to this worldwide trend, many actors think of a new class of systems, often labeled as "Smart Energy Systems" (SES) and develop new systems inside this class. However these systems focus on different aspects of the energy system, involve different stakeholders, include new components, functions and data structures and use different technologies, concepts, terminology and infrastructure. The class of SES comprises a variety of systems used in home appliances, energy management, district heating, intelligent devices, virtual power plants, demand side management, market places, data platforms, metering infrastructure, field devices, portal software, weather forecasting or grid operations.Many countries, national and international organizations are interested in SES, as this class of systems is expected to have an impact on national grid infrastructure, markets, customers and industries. In contrast the sheer amount of existing systems and their different architectures complicate the comprehension and comparison of different solutions or the elaboration of an abstract view on SES.