Distributed User Interface Management System for Interactive Collaborative Environments

The Ground Systems Development and Operations (GSDO) Smart Firing Room Project aims to create a firing room using cutting-edge technologies of today that are expected to be the state-of-the-art for the 2020s. One aspect of this project is providing a seamless Interactive Collaborative Environment (ICE) across a diverse array of user-facing devices — numerous screens of varying sizes, personal mobile devices, and natural user interface (NUI) sensors for multi-touch, gesture, and voice inputs. Applications accessible through the ICE are expected to provide Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs) that support collaborative features such as sharing applications with remote users, multi-user interaction for collaborative editing, and modular User Interfaces (UIs) to support customized workspaces spread across multiple devices. Using current technologies, developing an application with a DUI supporting such a wide variety of platforms is extremely costly due to the tight coupling between UIs, host platforms, and the application logic.