Trevor F. Smith

Designing for serendipity: supporting end-user configuration of ubiquitous computing environments

The future world of ubiquitous computing is one in which we will be surrounded by an ever-richer set of networked devices and services. In such a world, we cannot expect to have available to us specific applications that allow us to accomplish every conceivable combination of devices that we might wish. Instead, we believe that many of our interactions will be through highly generic tools that allow enduser discovery, configuration, interconnection, and control of the devices around us. This paper presents a design study of such an environment, intended to support serendipitous, opportunistic use of discovered network resources. We present an examination of a generic browser-style application built on top of an infrastructure developed to support arbitrary recombination of devices and services, as well as a number of challenges we believe to be inherent in such settings.

Using speakeasy for ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration

Peer-to-peer systems appear promising in terms of their ability to support ad hoc, spontaneous collaboration. However, current peer-to-peer systems suffer from several deficiencies that diminish their ability to support this domain, such as inflexibility in terms of discovery protocols, network usage, and data transports. We have developed the Speakeasy framework, which addresses these issues, and supports these types of applications. We show how Speakeasy addresses the shortcomings of current peer-to-peer systems, and describe a demonstration application, called Casca, that supports ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration by taking advantages of the mechanisms provided by Speakeasy.

Providing an Integrated User Experience of Networked Media, Devices, and Services through End-User Composition

Networked devices for the storage and rendering of digital media are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in homes throughout the industrialized world. Existing approaches to home media control will not suffice for the new capabilities offered by these digitally networked media devices. In particular, the piecemeal interaction provided by current devices, services, and applications will continue to engender frustration among users and will slow adoption of these technologies and the more sophisticated pervasive technologies that will surely follow them into the domestic environment. To address this challenge, we present OSCAR, an application that supports flexible and generic control of devices and services in near-future home media networks. It allows monitoring and manipulation of connections between devices, and allows users to construct reusable configurations to streamline frequently performed activities. A lab-based user study with 9 users of varied backgrounds showed that people could use OSCAR to configure and control a realistic and fully operational home media network, but that they struggled when constructing certain types of reusable configurations. The results of the study show that users were enthusiastic about adopting a system like OSCAR into their own media-related practices, but that further research and development is needed to make such systems truly useful.

User interfaces when and where they are needed: an infrastructure for recombinant computing

Users in ubiquitous computing environments need to be able to make serendipitous use of resources that they did not anticipate and of which they have no prior knowledge. The Speakeasy recombinant computing framework is designed to support such ad hoc use of resources on a network. In addition to other facilities, the framework provides an infrastructure through which device and service user interfaces can be made available to users on multiple platforms. The framework enables UIs to be provided for connections involving multiple entities, allows these UIs to be delivered asynchronously, and allows them to be injected by any party participating in a connection.

An extensible set-top box platform for home media applications

The number of different types of devices on the home network is expanding greatly. While this explosion of innovation provides compelling new devices to consumers, it problems with ensuring compatibility among these devices, and providing a useful overall user interface for them. This paper describes an experimental set-top box platform for home media applications. The key feature of this platform is that it can dynamically exchange code with other devices on the home network, allowing it to not only acquire new capabilities at runtime, but also provide new capabilities to peer devices on the network. These new capabilities can take the form of new data transmission protocols, CODECs, or user interfaces. We describe the underlying architecture of our platform, as well as the user interface that allows control over a variety of home devices.

Experiences with recombinant computing: Exploring ad hoc interoperability in evolving digital networks

This article describes an infrastructure that supports the creation of interoperable systems while requiring only limited prior agreements about the specific forms of communication between these systems. Conceptually, our approach uses a set of “meta-interfaces”—agreements on how to exchange new behaviors necessary to achieve compatibility at runtime, rather than requiring that communication specifics be built in at development time—to allow devices on the network to interact with one another. While this approach to interoperability can remove many of the system-imposed constraints that prevent fluid, ad hoc use of devices now, it imposes its own limitations on the user experience of systems that use it. Most importantly, since devices may be expected to work with peers about which they have no detailed semantic knowledge, it is impossible to achieve the sort of tight semantic integration that can be obtained using other approaches today, despite the fact that these other approaches limit interoperability. Instead, under our model, users must be tasked with performing the sense-making and semantic arbitration necessary to determine how any set of devices will be used together. This article describes the motivation and details of our infrastructure, its implications on the user experience, and our experience in creating, deploying, and using applications built with it over a period of several years.

Supporting the unremarkable: experiences with the obje Display Mirror

Many believe that ubiquitous computing will succeed when it has faded into the background of everyday life and work—that is, when it has become mundane. This paper examines the potential for technology to enhance users’ experience of their environments through the improvement of the unremarkable activities that comprise everyday experience. Based on a year-long longitudinal study, we describe how we designed, deployed, and evaluated technology to support and enhance a common but unremarkable practice: the act of connecting a portable computer to a shared display (e.g., VGA projector). We found that new capabilities of our technology introduced subtle but significant changes in the practices surrounding the sharing of information in meetings. However, we also met with substantial challenges in terms of deployment, adoption, and evaluation. We analyze and discuss these challenges in depth, in order to inform the design of future mundane, pervasive applications.

Supporting serendipitous integration in mobile computing environments

Abstract In the richly networked world of the near future, mobile computing users will be confronted with an ever-expanding array of devices and services accessible in their environments. In such a world, we cannot expect to have available to us specific applications that allow us to accomplish every conceivable combination of devices that we may wish. Instead, we believe that many of our interactions with the network will be characterized by the use of “general purpose” tools that allow us to discover, use, and integrate multiple devices around us. This paper lays out the case for why we believe that so-called “serendipitous integration” is a necessary fact that we will face in mobile computing, and explores a number of design experiments into supporting end user configuration and control of networked environments through general purpose tools. We present an iterative design approach to creating such tools and their user interfaces, discuss our observations about the challenges of designing for such a world, and then explore a number of tools that take differing design approaches to overcoming these challenges. We conclude with a set of reflections on the user experience issues that we believe are inherent in dealing with ad hoc mobile computing in richly networked environments.

The orbital browser: composing ubicomp services using only rotation and selection

Most ubiquitous computing environments are designed as collections of highly distributed and heterogeneous services. In this paper we describe a user interface, the Orbital Browser, which reduces the complexity of ubicomp service composition to two simple end-user operations: rotation and selection. We discuss the design requirements imposed by service composition and how we addressed them with our system.

FLANNEL: adding computation to electronic mail during transmission

In this paper, we describe FLANNEL, an architecture for adding computational capabilities to email. FLANNEL allows email to be modified by an application while in transit between sender and receiver. This modification is done without modification to the endpoints---mail clients---at either end. This paper also describes interaction techniques that we have developed to allow senders of email to quickly and easily select computations to be performed by FLANNEL. Through, our experience, we explain the properties that applications must have in order to be successful in the context of FLANNEL.