SmartUI: Resource-Saving and Editable Smartphone User Interface for Fast Remote PC Control

Abstract

There have been many previous studies to facilitate the use of smartphones as remote controllers of PCs. Image-based user interfaces have been suggested to provide fully functioning remote applications. However, most previous image-based interfaces consume high battery power and network bandwidth. Also most users have specific preferences on various applications on remote PCs, but previous smartphone interface systems would not allow users to define their own smartphone interfaces to set their preferences. This paper presents a new smartphone user interface system, SmartUI, for remote PC control. SmartUI is designed as a text-oriented web-based interface, so that it can be used on any smartphone with a built-in web browser while saving battery power and network bandwidth. Moreover, SmartUI enables a user to create buttons on a smartphone; for a quick launch and for shortcut keys, associated with a specific remote PC application. As a result, SmartUI allows a user to create his or her own smartphone interface for remote PC control, while saving battery power and network bandwidth. SmartUI has been tested with various smartphones and the results are also presented in this paper.