Supporting Mobile Users in Selecting Target Devices

The availability of applications able to exploit multi-device environments is steadily increasing. Rather than using all devices in the same way, users tend to assign different roles to devices due to the capabilities needed, such as computational power and screen size. Researchers and developers have started to introduce various techniques and tools to support managing applications across multiple devices. In this context, target device selection is often problematic, especially in unfamiliar environments. We present a novel technique for supporting device selection by providing dynamic graphical representations of user’s orientation and position in relation to the available target devices in the current environment. We report on its design, implementation and discuss two possible location-aware representations of the user and the target devices.