Smart Device Collaboration for Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Although a ubiquitous computing has been widespread and computers embedded into physical objects and living environments have been increased, personal portable devices are still necessary for various interactions with embedded computers. Despite of importance of those devices, input and output capabilities of them are limited and relatively impoverished compared to those of laptop computers. Moreover, users must pay an explicit attention to an interaction with portable devices. To solve these problems, we propose a smart device collaboration for a ubiquitous computing, which aims to realize that each embedded computer complements the lack of capability of a portable device in the ubiquitous computing environment. Our proposed smart device collaboration allows users to have appropriate interactions with embedded computers, without explicit attentions to existences of these computers and interfaces to them. This paper describes InfoPoint and Smart Furniture which are our experimental devices demonstrating smart device collaboration. We also observe advantages and disadvantages of these devices, present future works, and conclude a scheme of the smart device collaboration.