Task-driven distributed multimedia consumer system

摘要

A control system comprises multiple consumer electronics devices and task-driven control means coupled to the devices for controlling an interaction among the devices. The control means acts on respective software representations of each respective one of the consumer devices. By encapsulating the variable complexity of the task within a software representation, it can be made as simple or as sophisticated as needed to bring the capabilities up to a common level. Since the level of interface is common to the devices, applications can uniformly manipulate devices which embody very different levels of sophistication.