Translation Results Requested Through Conyac Made Public

We attribute the growing complexity of consumer electronics interface design to the desire to maintain the one-to-one correspondence between functions and controls that worked well for simpler devices. But as the number of functions of a device grows, controls get overloaded, leading to heavily-moded interfaces, push-and-hold buttons, long and deep menus, and other confusing and error-prone interface elements. The next generation of consumer electronics devices will incorporate processing and networking, making things potentially more complex if we stick to manual operation, but also opening up new possibilities for automating co-operation between multiple devices. Roadie is designed to operate with devices that 1) provide means to control their functions, and 2) that can query their state by external software. The first requirement allows Roadie to control the devices on the user’s behalf; the second allows Roadie not only to watch the state changes of the devices and interpret them as the user’s actions, but it also monitors the devices by looking for direct user interaction.
Unfortunately, the devices available to us at this time do not meet these two requirements. The devices’ manufacturers are aware of this problem and created the UPnP [15] standard. Unfortunately, the manufacturers have not started to build devices that fully comply with this standard. Furthermore, they sometimes do not fully expose to the applications programmer all the necessary controls and states to accomplish a given task. Some manufacturers are interested in implementing sets of branded devices that coordinate using a proprietary protocol that prevents systems like Roadie from fully implementing general interaction with the device.