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.

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.

The use of mobile computing systems continues to increase among a wider diversity of end-users. On desktop computers, a lot of research in the area of interactive visualization of graphical information has been done, but there is a growing opportunity to have the possibility of creating scalable and animated graphical data presentations on heterogeneous mobile devices. Latest trends in the mobile phone and PDA community (e.g. games and MMS) emphasize the demand for a better support of such rich graphical data that is scalable over multiple platforms. In this paper we present mobile services for the automotive after sales market that support the user in coping with the increasing functionality and complexity of cars and their repair procedures. We introduce a generic framework to sup- port the retrieval and visualization of operating instructions and car repair information according to the device, end- user (or consumer of the data) and car repair guidelines. As its core the framework provides the concept of Interactive Data Units (IDUs): graphical data blocks with a clean separation of structure, style and animation.