Noosphere: an activity-centric infrastructure for distributed interaction

Distributed interaction is a computing paradigm in which the interaction with a computer system is distributed over multiple devices, users and locations. Designing and developing distributed interaction systems is intrinsically difficult as it requires the engineering of a stable infrastructure to support the actual system and user interface. As an approach to this re-engineering problem, we introduce NooSphere, an activity-centric infrastructure and programming framework that provides a set of fundamental distributed services that enables quick development and deployment of distributed interactive systems. In this paper, we describe the requirements, design and implementation of NooSphere and validate the infrastructure by implementing three canonical real deployable applications constructed on top of the NooSphere infrastructure.