What is Physical user interface design

Activity-oriented computing (AOC) is a paradigm promoting the run-time realization of applications by composing ubiquitous services in the user’s surroundings according to abstract specifications of user activities. The paradigm is particularly well-suited for enacting ubiquitous applications. However, there is still a need for end-users to create and control the ubiquitous applications because they are better aware of their own needs and activities than any existing context-aware system could ever be. In this chapter, we give an overview of state of the art ubiquitous application composition, present the architecture of the MEDUSA middleware and demonstrate its realization, which is based on existing open-source solutions. On the basis of our discussion on state of the art ubiquitous application composition, we argue that current implementations of the AOC paradigm are lacking in end-user support. Our solution, the MEDUSA middleware, allows end-users to explicitly compose applications from networked services, while building on an activity-oriented computing infrastructure to dynamically realize the composition.