V2 Support Project at Trace - Toward a Universal Remote Console Standard
Table of Contents:
- What is V2?
- What are some potential benefits of V2?
- What is the V2 Support Project at Trace?
- Recent Publications
- Contact Information
What is V2?
V2 is the name of a technical committee at the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) that is charged with developing national standards for Information Technology Access Interfaces. The Trace Center joined V2 at its inception in Oct. 2000. This involvement within V2 is a continuation of Trace's former work on a Universal Remote Console Communication (URCC) Protocol.
The V2 Technical Committee is developing a set of standards for the discovery, selection, configuration, and operation of user interfaces and options. The purpose of these standards is to facilitate the development and deployment of a wide variety of devices (from different manufacturers) that can act as Universal Remote Consoles (URCs) for an equally varied range of devices and services (called "Targets"). In other words, the standards will allow users to control any number of Electronic and Information Technology devices in their environment.
For more information on V2, please refer to the V2 website.
What are some potential benefits of V2?
- "Natural language" voice control is possible for products adopting the V2 standard.
- V2 products can support multiple languages with ease - and online translation resources can allow even more.
- You can build V2 into products today, and they will work with tomorrow's technologies.
- Appliances in rental spaces would (if implementing V2) be accessible for people with disabilities.
- The products owned before acquiring a disability will still be accessible.
What is the V2 Support Project at Trace?
As a member of V2, Trace supports the work of V2 by actively participating in its meetings and discussions, by editing of the draft standard documents, and by hosting prototypical implementations.
All these activities serve the development of a comprehensive standard for alternate user interfaces, with the Universal Remote Console being one component. Trace plays an active role in discussing architectural issues within V2, aiming for defining a long-term architectural framework that could accommodate a diversity of standardized mechanisms to provide alternative user interfaces.
V2 Implementation Activities at Trace
The various V2 implementation and prototyping activities at Trace aim to support the V2 standards development by identifying requirements, exploring new solutions, providing proof-of-concept implementations and delivering publicly available software toolkits for the development of V2-compatible Targets and URCs in industry. Implementations take advantage of powerful existing technologies, like XML, XML Schema Definitions, XPath, Bluetooth, Universal Plug and Plug (UPnP), and Jini.
Current and future V2 implementation activities include:
- V2 Simulation Environment: An environment for graphical URCs and Target simulations, running in a Web browser. The user can run multiple URCs and multiple Targets at the same time. Targets may be picked from a set of pre-defined appliances (e.g. TV and VCR), or the user can create their own Target by editing a Target's description documents.
- Software development kits for Target and URC manufacturers
- V2 Resource Service: Manufacturers of Targets may upload Target-specific resources that can be obtained by URCs when controlling the Targets. Thus even Targets that are not V2 compatible as stand-alone products can be controlled by URCs if they are network-enabled.
- User Interface Builder: An authoring tool for creating and editing V2-compatible user interface descriptions.
Recent Publications
- Universal Remote Console Standard – Toward Natural User Interaction in Ambient Intelligence - Paper presented at CHI 2004.
- Toward a Unified Universal Remote Console Standard - Paper presented at CHI 2003.
- Universal Remote Console - Prototyping for the Alternate Interface Access Standard - Paper presented at the 7th ERCIM UI4ALL Workshop, Oct. 2002, Paris, France.
Contact Information
For more information about the V2 Support Program at Trace, please contact the Trace Center Info Line.