The Generic Interaction Protocol: Increasing portability of distributed physical user interfaces

Natural user interfaces want to liberate the user from having to learn new concepts to interact with computers. They do that by taking advantage of our senses and our own knowledge about world in order to build the user interface. Physical user interfaces are a prominent example, where physical objects are enhanced to represent actions or information that the system must exchange with the user. One of the main drawbacks of physical user interfaces is often related with the difficulty to decouple system logic from the specific technology used to build the user interface, especially when multiple environments or scenarios should be supported. This paper presents an abstraction technology for user interaction devices that allows the building of physical user interfaces that are physically and logically decoupled from the system logic.