UI Portals: Sharing Arbitrary Regions of User Interfaces on Traditional and Multi-user Interactive Devices

This paper introduces UI Portals, a novel approach to help users share their off-the-shelf applications' user interfaces on traditional and multi-user interactive devices among various platforms. Users can choose an application window or select parts of the window to share. In addition to the traditional single-user mouse-and-keyboard interaction, we provide support for simultaneous interactions on large multi-user interactive surfaces, like tabletops and multi-touch vertical surfaces. We describe the concepts and implementation mechanisms of this approach. Furthermore, we implement UI Portals Toolsets (UIPT), a prototype that demonstrates sharing arbitrary regions of user interfaces among multiple platforms without any change to the application source code. In UIPT, we design a windowing tool dedicated to large multi-user interactive surfaces to fully leverage the benefit of simultaneous interaction. Two typical scenarios demonstrate the utility of UIPT and show how UIPT can help users work with their familiar software applications on different displays and platforms.