The Universal Control Hub: An Open Platform for Remote User Interfaces in the Digital Home

This paper describes the application of an international user interface standard in the digital home in a gateway-based approach: The Universal Control Hub. ISO/IEC FDIS 24752 specifies the Universal Remote Console framework, promoting a "user interface socket" and pluggable user interfaces. The Universal Control Hub implements this standard in a way that facilitates the operation of existing controlled devices and controller devices. It retrieves user interfaces for the discovered target devices from resource servers that hold registered resources from multiple parties for any target device. Thus an open platform for user interfaces in the digital home is created that decouples the user interface from the device. This approach is expected to lead to more usable and more accessible user interfaces.