A toolkit to design adaptable user interfaces in ubiquitous computing environments

We describe an architecture to support the rapid development of software applications for mobile devices that can discover and adapt to resources in the environment of the user. To narrow the scope of our research, we focus on media-oriented applications involving the rendering, capture and control of pictures, audio or video. Inspired by the success of software component models, we introduce the concept of adaptive components. An adaptive component is a reusable building block that can discover and adapt to a dynamically changing context to deliver a generic interface functionality. Examples of such functionalities include the capture or playback of various types of media and the control of media services via physical user interfaces or graphical ones. We detail an early implementation of our architecture using Visual C#, UPnP and the Web presence manager distributed platform. We present how we used this implementation to create a simple media rendering service.