A rapid prototyping software infrastructure for user interfaces in ubiquitous augmented reality

Recent user interface concepts, such as multimedia, multimodal, wearable, ubiquitous, tangible, or augmented-reality-based (AR) interfaces, each cover different approaches that are all needed to support complex human-computer interaction. Increasingly, an overarching approach towards building what we call ubiquitous augmented reality (UAR) user interfaces that include all of the just mentioned concepts will be required. To this end, we present a user interface architecture that can form a sound basis for combining several of these concepts into complex systems. We explain in this paper the fundamentals of DWARF's user interface framework (DWARF standing for distributed wearable augmented reality framework) and an implementation of this architecture. Finally, we present several examples that show how the framework can form the basis of prototypical applications.