Automatically Generating Interfaces for Multi-Device Environments

With the increasing pervasiveness of wireless technologies, users will increasingly want to interact with appliances in their environment from their mobile device. One of the challenges to supporting such ubiquitous control is the creation of user interfaces for the mobile device. Should the mobile device be pre-programmed with interfaces for each appliance that it can control, should it download pre-designed user interfaces from each appliance, or should it download an abstract description of the appliance and then automatically generate a user interface to enable control? In this position paper we describe the Personal Universal Controller project, which is studying the automatic generation solution to this problem, and show how our infrastructure supports multi-device environments, which could contain a peripheral awareness device.