Towards Dynamic and Cooperative Multi-device Personal Computing

The significant technological advances in hardware miniaturisation and data communications change the landscape of computing in a profound way. A rich variety of sensing, storage and processing nodes will soon be embedded in artefacts and clothes worn by people. Numerous computing elements will be integrated in appliances, furniture, buildings, public spaces and vehicles. It now becomes possible to move beyond the physical but also mental boundaries of the desktop, and to develop novel forms of computing that will efficiently support people in their daily activities without constantly being in the center of their attention. In the 2WEAR project, we have explored the concept of a system that can be formed in an ad-hoc fashion by putting together several wearable, portable and infrastructure devices that communicate via short-range radio. This setting deviates from the desktop paradigm in significant ways. What we usually refer to as “the” computer becomes a collection of different autonomous elements that co-operate in a dynamic fashion without relying on a pre-arranged setup. Various applications and units of functionality reside on separate devices that can be widely heterogeneous in terms of computing and user interaction resources. Moreover, the number and type of elements comprising the personal system can change at any point in time. Using proximity as a natural form of control, the user may produce a wide range of system configurations, leading to different device interactions and application functionality. As a step towards this vision, we have worked towards advanced mechanisms for dealing with yet at the same time exploiting the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of such a system, with minimal programmer and user intervention. In the following, we put our work in perspective of the research done in the area of ubiquitous computing. We continue by giving a motivating scenario and an overview of our system architecture. Then, we present in more detail the most important elements of the 2WEAR system: (i) an open and flexible communication framework; (ii) support for distributed user interfaces; and (iii) seamless distributed storage management. Finally, we revisit our scenario, indicating how it can be actually implemented using our system.