Smart Spaces are work spaces embedded with computers, information appliances, and multi-modal sensors that allow people to work efficiently, together or individually, through unprecedented access to information and help from computers. Smart Spaces identify and perceive users and their actions and goals; facilitate interaction with information rich sources; provide for the use of mobile devices and receivers; provide extensive information-presentation capabilities; understand and anticipate user needs during task performance; increase the rate of information interchange, both locally and remotely; provide improved memory of activities and deliberations for later use; and support collaborative operations on shared data/knowledge representations. They use immersive presentation approaches to provide more usable and understandable access to data and information, based on perceived user activities and needs. They also provide mobile workers with ubiquitous access to, and natural interaction with, information important for achieving their tasks and goals.

An example of a Smart Space is a smart meeting room, such as a business meeting room, a medical consultation meeting room, a training and education facility, a military command center, or a crisis management command center.

A smart meeting room understands and guides meeting participants, sensing who is talking to whom and where the participants are located, realizing when information is requested, outputting information that seems to be useful, and occasionally taking the lead to get more information from the participants. Microphones are used for speech input, as well as to determine the locations of people based on where their speech sounds are coming from. Cameras are used to determine the actions and locations of people and other objects.

The computers in the smart room communicate with the meeting participants and provide requested information through integrated speech and visual displays. Dialogue-based speech input allows the room's computers to engage the participants in dialogue to understand their requests. The room is connected to the Internet and digital libraries/databases.

Each participant can have a palm/pocket computer containing personal information. Through wireless communication, the room has access to this personal information. The computers in the room recognize the individuals through face recognition, speaker identification, and information from their palm/pocket computers. The room knows what the participants are doing and what their intents and goals are. The room responds to requests for information. By understanding the context of what is occurring, the room anticipates the data needs of the working group and queues information before it is actually needed to reduce latency. The room also records and summarizes meeting dialogue, activities and events. Information retrieval/extraction approaches are used to retrieve requested information. Visualization approaches are used to determine how to display relevant information on information appliances and wall displays.

The room helps the participants interact and collaborate with one another, as well as with people in other rooms and facilities (distributed collaboration). Field personnel wearing sensors and computers can also participate in the meeting. The coupling of fielded sensors and devices with dynamic, wireless wide-area networks effectively creates wide-area Smart Spaces.

Smart Space technologies can also be used in applications including

1. information analysis (e.g., intelligence analysis) - using technologies of data visualization and display capabilities, as well as spoken interfaces to databases and query spaces,
2. medicine - sight, sound, and touch-based interfaces would allow scarce, highly-trained expertise to be "tele-ported" to distributed sites; collaborating emergency room physicians would immediately know which other specialists are nearby, which accidents are causing which victims to be on their way to emergency rooms, and they would have immediate access to medical records of accident victims
3. collaborative authoring, design and verification (both locally and remotely),
4. field of sensors - spread a large number of sensors around an outdoor area (e.g., natural disaster area) to provide information to people engaging in tasks in the area,
5. smart vehicles - provide for (a) communication between the vehicle and its occupants, (b) mobile wireless communications, (c) internet-based services to the vehicle and its occupants, (d) autonomous driving capabilities.