Adding Flexible Input Device Support to a Web Browser with MundoMonkey

Abstract

Computer applications are increasingly used in non-desktop settings, e.g. at a public kiosk systems or on mobile phones. Thanks to the widespread availability of web browsers for different platforms, web interfaces are often employed in these settings. However, current browsers lack sufficient support for flexibly adapting to non-desktop settings, e.g. ad-hoc changes of input devices. A use case for this is, e.g., an interactive shopping window that presents a web interface for buying products. If the browser in the shopping window supported ad-hoc changes of input devices, the customer could dynamically attach carried input devices, e.g., a mobile phone, to the browser and interact with it. In this paper, we present a solution to the problem of dynamically connecting input devices in a non-desktop setting to a browser, based on the MundoMonkey Firefox extension for interactive spaces. Using our approach, the unmodified web user interface can be used with arbitrary in- put devices in ways that cannot be realized by synthesizing mouse and keyboard events. In our approach, the customization to the device at hand is performed transparently to the application developer by the end-user.