Interaction Proxy Manager

Abstract

Emerging terminals, such as smartwatches, true wireless earphones, in-vehicle computers, etc., are complementing our portals to ubiquitous information services. However, the current ecology of information services, encapsulated into millions of mobile apps, is largely restricted to smartphones; accommodating them to new devices requires tremendous and almost unbearable engineering efforts. Interaction Proxy, firstly proposed as an accessible technique, is a potential solution to mitigate this problem. Rather than re-building an entire application, Interaction Proxy constructs an alternative user interface that intercepts and translates interaction events and states between users and the original app's interface. However, in such a system, one key challenge is how to robustly and efficiently "communicate" with the original interface given the instability and dynamicity of mobile apps (e.g., dynamic application status and unstable layout). To handle this, we first define UI-Independent Application Description (UIAD), a reverse-engineered semantic model of mobile services, and then propose Interaction Proxy Manager (IPManager), which is responsible for synchronizing and managing the original apps' interface, and providing a concise programming interface that exposes information and method entries of the concerned mobile services. In this way, developers can build alternative interfaces without dealing with the complexity of communicating with the original app's interfaces. In this paper, we elaborate the design and implementation of our IPManager, and demonstrate its effectiveness by developing three typical proxies, mobile-smartwatch, mobile-vehicle and mobile-voice. We conclude by discussing the value of our approach to promote ubiquitous computing, as well as its limitations.