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and correct for every moment.
Therefore, to carry out the work will be necessary
to meet a number of sub-targets to facilitate the at-
tainment of the main goal outlined in the introduc-
tion. These goals can be classified into the following
points:
1. Definition of a general interaction model between
environment elements where the Internet of the
Future will deploy.
2. Study of different concepts, design features and
technologies for the development of multi-device
interfaces in order to obtain a semantic model to
tackle the problem consistently.
3. Analysis of the different techniques that enable
proactive systems to establish the relationship be-
tween people and systems, using the more suit-
able Input/Output device at all times. We have
studied the characteristics to be defined within the
context of this particular smart spaces type, being
very important to define how to create an inter-
face to ensure efficient interaction between users
and the environment.
3 NEW INTERACTION
CONCEPTS FOR INTERNET OF
THE FUTURE
To realize the scope of interaction in the Internet of
the Future is necessary explain two concepts: What
we understand for multi-device interfaces and how
systems can create those interfaces without users su-
pervision.
3.1 Multi-device Interaction
Historically, the development of interfaces has fo-
cused on exploiting the concept of one device - one
user(A. H. Jørgensen, 2008), basically dealing with
environments where the user wants or needs to inter-
act with an application or device. In an environment
consisting of an indeterminate number of I/O devices
and several users with different knowledge levels and
heterogeneous needs, it becomes necessary to move
towards a multi-device interaction to obtain the best
performance.
In the figure 1 we can observe how the system
transforms a tactile interaction to a gestural interac-
tion by using environment elements such as a web
cam and public screen. For this, the system uses a de-
vice ontology. Each device has a properties list which
the system will use to create the new interface, by
finding the best I/O device combination.
Figure 1: Transformation from Tactile interaction to multi-
device gestural interaction.
Therefore, we can define the multi-device inter-
action as the concept where one or more users use
the interaction capabilities of the devices available in
the environment (simultaneous or consecutive) to im-
prove the user experience of offered services. The
idea behind this concept is to facilitate the creation
of similar interfaces using different elements of smart
space, enabling user-system communication in situa-
tions of loss of interaction points.
3.2 Proactive Modeling Techniques for
User Interface and Interaction
Due to that, the goal of this work is to establish
a model and a proactive methodology for the inter-
face creation for Input/Output, it is necessary to de-
termine the technique with which the system must
generate these interfaces. Originally, techniques for
user interface modeling and interaction were devel-
oped to assist software engineers in the implemen-
tation of visual and attractive applications. By us-
ing these techniques they were allowed to raise the
level of abstraction focusing the attention on interac-
tion problems rather than the implementation details
(Szekely, 2006), obtaining products with fewer errors
and higher usability and accessibility degree.
The techniques currently used for developing
user interfaces (XUL, Teresa (Paterno et al., 2008),
UIMLA (UIML, 2009), UsiXML (Limbourg et al.,
2005)) should provide the basis for the development
of new proactive techniques where the system decides
the best interface at any given time. In this way se-
mantics become very important for the description of
the available devices in a smartspace, and so, to deter-
minate the best possible interface combination to cre-
ate the desired interface. Through a proper semantic
description and using appropriate artificial intelligent
techniques it is possible to define a user interface that
facilitates user interaction with the system and other-
wise. This has to be done, at least, where the point of
interaction is lost due to communication problems or
infrastructure.
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