Clicky: User-centric Input for Active Spaces

We present a user-centric input system that is useful for a variety of applications in ubiquitous computing environments. Users in these environments currently switch between different keyboards and mice, or other devices, to interact with all the devices present. Allowing users to select a personal input device for the space and use it to interact with all the devices in the space is a more natural approach. Associating a user with an input device also serves to distinguish between the different users in a space, and creates the notion of a user session that is useful for applications like authenticating user actions on shared public displays or logging a particular user’s activities. Clicky is our prototype implementation of this idea. It allows a user with a single mouse and keyboard to control multiple computers and displays running standard operating systems in a smart-space environment. It is designed to be a light-weight middleware tool that does not require modifications to the base operating system. Any input device in the room, such as the keyboard and mouse on a personal laptop or handheld computer, can be used as a user’s input device to interact with the space. Clicky allows users to configure a set of displays in the space into a large “virtual display” and use a single mouse pointer to move across it. It also allows multiple users with their own input devices to share a public display. In this paper, we describe the motivation for a user-centric input system, and describe the current status of the implementation.