[Paper Review] CELIO: An application development framework for interactive spaces

Yedendra Shrinivasan, Yunfeng Zhang|arXiv (Cornell University)|Oct 4, 2017

Interactive and Immersive Displays15 references6 citations

TL;DR

CELIO is a microservices-based application development framework that decouples application logic from hardware and architectural specifics in interactive spaces, enabling rapid, responsive design akin to responsive web development. By abstracting input, output, and infrastructure variations, it reduces development, deployment, and maintenance overhead, allowing applications to be portable and maintainable across diverse interactive environments with minimal rework.

ABSTRACT

Developing applications for interactive space is different from developing cross-platform applications for personal computing. Input, output, and architectural variations in each interactive space introduce big overhead in terms of cost and time for developing, deploying and maintaining applications for interactive spaces. Often, these applications become on-off experience tied to the deployed spaces. To alleviate this problem and enable rapid responsive space design applications similar to responsive web design, we present CELIO application development framework for interactive spaces. The framework is micro services based and neatly decouples application and design specifications from hardware and architecture specifications of an interactive space. In this paper, we describe this framework and its implementation details. Also, we briefly discuss the use cases developed using this framework.

Motivation & Objective

• To address the high cost and complexity of developing, deploying, and maintaining applications in interactive spaces due to hardware and architectural diversity.
• To enable responsive, adaptive application design in interactive spaces similar to responsive web design principles.
• To decouple application and design logic from low-level hardware and infrastructure specifications.
• To reduce application lifecycle overhead by abstracting input, output, and system architecture variations.

Proposed method

• The framework employs a microservices architecture to modularize application components and isolate concerns.
• It introduces a separation between application logic, design specifications, and hardware abstraction layers.
• Input and output abstractions are defined as first-class components, enabling dynamic adaptation to different sensors and actuators.
• The framework uses configuration-driven deployment, allowing applications to be reused across different physical spaces with minimal changes.
• It supports runtime discovery and binding of devices and services through a service registry.
• A domain-specific language (DSL) is used to express design and interaction logic independently of underlying infrastructure.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can application development for interactive spaces be made more modular and maintainable despite hardware and architectural diversity?
• RQ2 Can a framework decouple application logic from physical deployment environments to enable rapid prototyping and reuse?
• RQ3 To what extent can responsive design principles from web development be adapted to interactive physical spaces?
• RQ4 How effectively can a microservices-based architecture reduce development and maintenance overhead in interactive space applications?

Key findings

• The framework successfully decouples application logic from hardware and infrastructure, enabling applications to be reused across different interactive spaces with minimal modification.
• Development time and maintenance overhead were significantly reduced due to abstraction of input, output, and system architecture.
• The use of microservices and configuration-driven deployment allowed for dynamic adaptation to varying sensor and actuator configurations.
• Use cases demonstrated that applications built with CELIO could be rapidly deployed and reconfigured in new environments without rewriting core logic.
• The framework supports responsive design patterns in physical spaces, similar to those in web development, enabling more agile and iterative design processes.
• The separation of concerns through a DSL for design logic improved maintainability and facilitated collaboration between designers and developers.