MundoMonkey: customizing interaction with web applications in interactive spaces

We notice an increasing usage of web applications in interactive spaces, a variant of ubiquitous computing environments. Interactive spaces feature a large and dynamically changing number of devices, e.g., an interactive TV set in the living room that is used with different input devices or an iPhone that is dynamically federated to devices in the environment. Web applications need a better way to exploit the resources in the interactive space beyond the standard input devices like mouse and keyboard, e.g., a speech recognition device. This paper presents MundoMonkey a web browser extension and programming API for interactive spaces. The API follows the event based programming paradigm for allowing web applications and end-user scripts to access the interactive space. Our approach aligns well with the commonly used programming style for web applications. We used MundoMonkey to customize the interface of web applications to user preferences and the interactive space at hand. To our knowledge our approach is the first to address adaptation of the output as well as processing of input data. With MundoMonkey the customization is performed transparently to the application developer by the end-user. Thereby, MundoMonkey is an alternative to model driven user interface development approaches.