Self-Organizing User Interfaces: Envisioning the Future of Ubicomp UIs

This workshop paper envisions a future of selforganizing UIs for ubiquitous computing. It proposes using self-organization to join many co-located interactive devices into an ad-hoc community of devices that serves users as a single usable and seamless UI. All devices of the community are aware of each other’s presence and contribute their individual input/output capabilities for the common goal of providing users with a seamless, usable, and accessible interface that spans across device boundaries. This is achieved by letting the UI’s behavior emerge from simple rules that react to changes in presence, location, distance, orientation, and movement of neighboring devices and users. By using simple rules of proxemic interactions between devices, deterministic preciseness of classic top-down design and modeling is traded in against less controllable, but more adaptable, robust, and scalable bottom-up designs that automatically react to the dynamics of ad-hoc real-world usage.