Reinventing the share button for physical spaces

Imagine if your favorite social networking website provided a "Share to Screen" button that automatically dimmed the room lights and streamed your web-based photos and videos to a nearby television, projector or photo frame. Unfortunately, such fluid interactions between the Web and the physical environment remain challenging, since conventional Web browsers are still unable to directly interact with the broad range of context sources and physical actuators available in highly heterogeneous mobile environments. In our previous work, we presented our plug-and-play context framework, called Ambient Dynamix (Dynamix), which enables advanced context sensing and acting capabilities to be deployed on-demand to mobile devices as plug-ins; enabling entirely new interaction techniques for the Web. To illustrate some of these possibilities, we demonstrate a fully functional Web application that leverages Dynamix plug-ins to stream shared photos and videos from a popular online social network to nearby media rendering devices discovered in the user's physical environment. For a better viewing experience, the demo also adjusts the room's ambient light dimmers through ad-hoc discovery and control of home automation equipment. The demo highlights how Dynamix enables Web applications to discover rich, high-order contextual information, perform context-aware adaptations, and directly influence the physical environment - all from within unmodified mobile Web browsers, such as Google Chrome and Firefox.