AmbientWeb: Bridging the Web's cyber-physical gap

Abstract

The Web has rapidly evolved from a static informational medium into a highly capable interactive application platform. Today, Web browsers have become the de facto interface for many networked applications; however, conventional Web browsers are still unable to directly interact with the broad range of context sources and actuators available in highly heterogeneous mobile environments. In our Ambient Dynamix project, we are creating a new approach for mobile computing, where advanced context sensing and acting capabilities are deployed to mobile devices on-demand as plug-ins, and are made available to applications through only a few lines of code. In this paper, we present an extension of our Dynamix Framework, called AmbientWeb, which exposes Dynamix's plug-and-play context capabilities to Web applications running in unmodified mobile Web browsers, such as Google Chrome and Firefox. By leveraging AmbientWeb, browser-based Web applications are able to directly interact with contextually relevant resources without requiring environmental modification or Web-based proxies. For the IoT Challenge, we present a fully operational version of the AmbientWeb architecture along with an example browser-based Web application that uses runtime installed Dynamix plug-ins to discover rich, high-order contextual information, perform context-aware adaptations, and influence the physical environment through direct ad-hoc control of DMX-based lighting equipment.