Building Applications for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Ubiquitous computing embodies a fundamental change from traditional desktop computing. The computational environment is augmented with heterogeneous devices, choice of input and output devices, mobile users, and contextual information. The design of systems and applications needs to accommodate this new operating environment. In this paper, we present our vision of future computing environments we term User Virtual Spaces, the challenges facing developers, and how they motivate the need for new application design. We present our approach for developing applications that are portable across ubiquitous computing environments and describe how we use contextual information to store and organize application data and user preferences. We present an application we have implemented that illustrates the advantages of our techniques in this new computing environment.