Interacting with Federated Devices

Some ubiquitous computing visions propose to embed an abundance of input and output devices in the environment. Depending on the context, the user can either interact with her limited personal device, or input and output devices from the surrounding infrastructure. But what about situations in which the user has need for the capabilities of both types of devices at the same time? A user might need to display something privately, while needing the screen real estate of a large wall mounted display. For such situations we propose using mobile devices together with those provided by the environment. We have developed a runtime environment that coordinates multiple devices to do just that. Currently we are exploring the usability of the use of multiple devices concurrently. We are also investigating the problems of authoring such interfaces.