A Lightweight UI Software Infrastructure for Wrist-Based Displays: If Your Microwave Oven Could Talk to Your Watch, What Would It Say?

Supporting a rich array of information sources is a key element to making highly mobile computing devices usable by the wider community. It is our belief that there will not be one specific killer application for this form of computing device, but an array of applications that the user can easily access. These applications will be context sensitive and associated with a range of activities. We have developed a custom watch platform that acts as a display for presenting this type of information to the user. In order to make the watch as small and low powered as possible, we have offloaded the processing onto an external mobile device we term a personal server, which is also carried by the user. We present our lightweight software infrastructure supporting a wrist-based display communicating with a portable personal server