Distributed User Interfaces: Designing Interfaces for the Distributed Ecosystem

The recent advances in display technologies and mobile devices are having an important effect on the way users interact with all kinds of devices (computers, mobile devices, laptops, tablets, and so on). These advances are opening up new possibilities for interaction, including the distribution of the UI (User Interface) among different devices. It implies that the UI can be split and composed, moved, copied or cloned among devices running the same or different operating systems. These new ways of manipulating the UI are considered under the emerging topic of Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs).

DUIs are related to the repartition of one or many elements, from one or many user interfaces, in order to support one or many users, to carry out one or many tasks, on one or many domains, in one or many contexts of use – each context of use consists of users, platforms, and environments.

The 20 chapters in the book cover the state-of-the-art, the foundations, and novel applications of DUIs including case studies and real scenarios.