Toward rapid and iterative development of tangible, collaborative, distributed user interfaces

Distributed, tangible, collaborative applications involve potentially complex interactions of users, computing platforms, and physical artifacts. Realizing the necessary connections for these interactions can create hardware and software dependencies early in development, resulting in a system that is difficult to adapt to design changes. The Ensemble architecture is designed to encourage exploratory development of these systems by limiting the impact of changing components. Ensemble is a product of the exploratory design process it supports, evolving through use in two distinct application domains. The experience gained from these implementations has shaped Ensemble's structure and design priorities, resulting in a component-based architecture that includes: (i) an application framework and graphical user interface support; (ii) a service framework, including service publication and discovery; (iii) local and remote event handling; (iv) distributed user and resource coordination; and (v) a structured configuration language shared by all Ensemble components.