Gedurende de laatste jaren steeg de populariteit van mobiele computers om de bezoekerservaring te verrijken en vonden deze apparaten hun weg naar musea en andere erfgoedinstellingen. De voordelen van het gebruik van mobiele computers zijn duidelijk: informatie kan op een dynamische manier via het toestel gepresenteerd worden, zonder dat de fysieke ruimte zelf erdoor wordt verstoord. Bovendien kan de presentatie op een multimediale manier gebeuren: een mobiele computer kan verscheidene media tonen, zoals foto's, audio- en videofragmenten, tekst, … Omdat de bezoeker op verschillende manieren met het toestel kan interageren, worden ook interactieve spelen mogelijk. De dynamiek en autonomie die met deze toestellen behaald kunnen worden, zorgen er bovendien voor dat gebruikers hun eigen tempo kunnen aanhouden en informatie kunnen verkrijgen die afgestemd is op het persoonlijk interesseprofel.

Discovering and unlocking the full potential of complex pervasive environments is still approached in application-centric ways. A set of statically deployed applications often defines the possible interactions within the environment. However, the increasing dynamics of such environments require a more versatile and generic approach which allows the end-user to inspect, configure and control the overall behavior of such an environment. A meta-UI addresses these needs by providing the end-user with an interactive view on a physical or virtual environment which can then be observed and manipulated at runtime. The meta-UI bridges the gap between the resource providers and the end-users by abstracting a resource's features as executable activities that can be assembled at runtime to reach a common goal. In order to allow software services to automatically integrate with a pervasive computing environment, the minimal requirements of the environment's meta-UI must be identified and agreed on. In this paper we present Meta-STUD, a goal- and service-oriented reference framework that supports the creation of meta-UIs for usage in pervasive environments. The framework is validated using two independent implementation approaches designed with different technologies and focuses.

Users often find it hard to understand and control the behavior of a Ubicomp system. This gives rise to usability problems and can lead to loss of user trust, which may hamper the acceptance of these systems. We are extending an existing Ubicomp framework to allow users to pose why and why not questions about its behavior. Initial experiments suggest that these questions are easy to use and could help users in understanding how Ubicomp systems work.

Considering the amount of devices a user owns nowadays, a distributed user interface can become increasingly important. This requires reasoning techniques that allow making predictions of future values in the spatial model because these devices can be expected to change their location during usage. Our primary attention will be devoted to the problem of re-distribution of user interfaces in a constantly changing environment. So that a change in spatial topology, i.e. in the way the devices are located relative to one another, will be detected on time and interpreted in a proper way, resulting in redistribution of a user interface the devices are sharing.

Designers still often create a specific user interface for every target platform they wish to support, which is time-consuming and error-prone. The need for a multi-platform user interface design approach that designers feel comfortable with increases as people expect their applications and data to go where they go. We present Gummy, a multi-platform graphical user interface builder that can generate an initial design for a new platform by adapting and combining features of existing user interfaces created for the same application. Our approach makes it easy to target new plat- forms and keep all user interfaces consistent without requiring designers to considerably change their work practice.

Multi-touch large display interfaces are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. These spaces impose specific requirements on the accessibility of the user interfaces: most users are not familiar with the interface and expectations with regard to user experience are very high. Multi-touch interaction beyond the traditional move-rotate-scale interactions is often unknown to the public and can become exceedingly complex. We introduce TouchGhosts: visual guides that are embedded in the multi-touch user interface and that demonstrate the available interactions to the user. TouchGhosts are activated while using an interface, providing guidance on the fly and within the context-of-use. Our approach allows to define reconfigurable strategies to decide how or when a TouchGhost should be activated and which particular visualization will be presented to the user.