Distributed User Interfaces in Ambient Environment

Before developing an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) application, it is often required to examine how its user interface will be distributed across the various interaction surfaces of its physical environment and which types of services these user interfaces will provide to end-users. For this purpose, a virtual reality rendering engine has been developed that renders a user interface model in a physical environment expressed by an environment model and a service model which enables designers to prototype the definition and the distribution of such user interfaces. After the modeling phase, the user interface is rendered in a virtual reality scene that may be subject to prototyping thanks to the model rendering engine. Any suggestion for modification applied on the underlying models (i.e., user interface, environment, and service) is propagated in the virtual reality scene. Depending on the interaction surface where a particular user interface is rendered, some adaptation rules may be performed expressed in terms of model-to-model transformations.