INCA: Architectural Support for Building Automated Capture & Access Applications

Applications that automatically capture some details of a live experience and provide future access to that experience are increasingly common in the ubiquitous computing community. However, there remains a largely unexplored design space of potential new applications, and very few of the previous systems have been able to evolve in functionality over an extended period of time. To overcome these challenges, we present a distillation of the essential architectural features of an automated capture and access application. We introduce a toolkit, Infrastructure for Capture and Access (INCA) that encourages a simplified model for designing, implementing and evolving capture and access applications. We validate the utility of INCA through three sample applications that show variety within the wider design space and accessibility of the toolkit for others.