DIAMOND

A framework for Dividing Interfaces Across Multiple Opportunistically aNnexed Devices.

Students: Heather Hutchings

Despite the increasing prevalence of physically proximate computing devices, current interfaces remain largely limited to single computing devices because of the prevailing assumption that interfaces can only draw on input and output (I/O) resources attached to the same device. That assumption has led previous research to emphasize transferring interaction to the computer with the best available I/O resources, but that approach introduces security and privacy risks. We propose to instead allow users to divide interfaces across multiple devices so that they can allocate functionality and information appropriate across trusted and untrusted devices. DIAMOND is a prototype framework that we are developing to support Dividing Interfaces Across Multiple Opportunistically aNnexed Devices.

		DIAMOND is a first step toward allowing the user, system, and designer to all play a part in the division of the interface at run-time.
		Our initial implementation of DIAMOND relies on an asymmetric tuple space to move information, interface descriptions, and commands between devices.
		The ability to divide interfaces allows users to, for example, compose an email using a public desktop computer while keeping the private headers on their personal device.
		One of the questions we are exploring in DIAMOND is how and when users would want to divide interfaces to applications. We are using a variety of approaches, including simple paper prototypes.

Heather M. Hutchings and Jeffrey S. Pierce.
DIAMOND: A Framework for Dividing Interfaces Across Multiple Opportunistically aNnexed Devices.
GVU Technical Report GIT-GVU-05-21.