Experiments with mobile computing middleware for deploying appliance UIs

An important component of the vision of ubiquitous computing is universal appliance-interaction-the ability to use mobile and wearable computers such as cell phones and palmtops to interact with arbitrary devices and appliances distributed over a network. This raises the user interface (UI) deployment issue, which involves implementing middleware for deploying compatible UIs of arbitrary appliances on different kinds of mobile computers. In this paper, we provide a preliminary evaluation of different approaches to implementing such middleware consisting of experimental results and a qualitative analysis. In this evaluation, we compare (a) generating vs. installing predefined UIs, (b) installing local vs. remote predefined UIs, (c) deployment of speech vs. graphical UIs, (d) deployment of UIs of simple vs. complex appliances, (e) deployment over a wireless and wired network, and (f) deployment on laptop and palmtop computers. We consider storage costs, deployment times, and operation invocation times in our experiments.