Automatic Generation of Device User-Interfaces?

One of the visions of pervasive computing is using mobile computers to interact with networked devices. A question raised by this vision is: should the user-interfaces of these devices be handcrafted manually or generated automatically? Based on experience within the domain of desktop computing, the answer seems to be that automatic generation is not flexible enough to support a significant number of useful interfaces but requires substantially less coding effort for the interfaces it can create. We show that the answer is much more complicated when we consider networking of traditional appliances such as stereos and TVs. Using qualitative arguments and quantitative experimental data, we show that the manual vs. generated issue must be resolved based on: (a) not only user-interface programming and flexibility but also several other metrics such as space and time costs, binding time, and reliability (b) whether it is a graphical or speech based user-interface, (c) the size of the device user-interface, (d) whether the manually written user-interface code is available at the mobile computer or at a remote machine, and (e) the network bandwidth between the mobile computer and remote factory

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