Towards A Usable API for Constructing Interactive Multi-Surface Systems

Research into multi-surface systems goes back for more than thirty years, yet these systems have not been taken up in realworld settings. We believe the reason for the lack of adoption is that constructing multi-surface systems is costly and requires specialist knowledge of tasks related to device discovery, crossplatform interoperability, networking, and spatial tracking. These tasks represent a significant distraction from implementing features that actually matter to end users. While some APIs exist for supporting the set-up of multi-surface systems, they are directed at specialist developers. We propose to develop a highly learnable API for constructing multi-surface systems, which is targeted at non-specialists.