Designing peer-to-peer distributed user interfaces: Case studies on building distributed applications

• We present three peer-to-peer distributed user interface applications, including a media player, a multiplayer Tetris, and a multi-device collaborative search system.
• We identify general challenges for peer-to-peer distributed user interfaces using these applications as case studies.
• We describe our implementation of each application that overcomes these challenges.
• We derive general design guidelines for peer-to-peer distributed user interface design.

Building a distributed user interface (DUI) application should ideally not require any additional effort beyond that necessary to build a non-distributed interface. In practice, however, DUI development is fraught with several technical challenges such as synchronization, resource management, and data transfer. In this paper, we present three case studies on building distributed user interface applications: a distributed media player for multiple displays and controls, a collaborative search system integrating a tabletop and mobile devices, and a multiplayer Tetris game for multi-surface use. While there exist several possible network architectures for such applications, our particular approach focuses on peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures. This focus leads to a number of challenges and opportunities. Drawing from these studies, we derive general challenges for P2P DUI development in terms of design, architecture, and implementation. We conclude with some general guidelines for practical DUI application development using peer-to-peer architectures.