Environment management for hybrid user interfaces

As computers proliferate, becoming smaller, more mobile, more powerful and more diverse, how will the ways in which we interact with them change? In this article, we describe research in developing “hybrid user interfaces” that tie together the diverse displays and interaction devices that a user may encounter in a mobile, shared environment. Controlling such a dynamically changing, heterogeneous mix of computers is a problem that we refer to as “environment management”. We sketch some ways in which publicizing semantic information about computational objects and tasks can make it possible to automate environment management operations, and we describe research testbeds we are developing within which to explore these ideas