Intel shows off experimental device UI

INTEL RESEARCH not only had the hard silicon based stuff on display, but also a bunch of software. One of the most interesting was a UI for connecting computers and devices easily and transparently.

There are many methods for connecting devices, from auto-discovery to near field communication (touching), and just as many ways to send info across those links. You can do this with Wi-Fi, ethernet, bluetooth or the current flavour of the day, UWB wireless USB.

These solve the problem of doing it, but you don't necessarily want to connect to everything, tying up resources, burning device power and bandwidth. How does your widget know what to pull from the other widget?

That is where the research comes in, and the answer is pretty ingenious, let the user decide. Present them with the info, obtained via the above methods and do it in a nice easy to use fashion. Each three pointed shape is a device, two being UMPCs and the other the desktop the Composition Manager was running on.

In this simplified demo, each device has storage, network and display. You can make one device use the resources of the other by drawing a line from one resource to the other. Here the pink CPU is tied to the blue R CPU and is using it's display. You can also read off the other device's hard drives or send from their network in the same way.

The idea is simple, here is what you have, and here is what you can connect to. Connect the dots. What more do you need? No, this is a geek site, don't answer that. µ