System for supporting remote accesses to a host computer from a mobile computing device
Users of a client computer having non-conventional input devices interact with a host computing platform with the same user experience as if he or she was operating the client computer natively. This is achieved by having the non-conventional input devices of the client device appear local to the applications that are running on the host platform, even though the host computing platform may not be equipped with drivers for the non-conventional input devices.
1. A virtualized computer system, comprising:
a virtual machine executing in a server computer, wherein the virtual machine is remotely accessible by a computing device having input devices including a touch-based input device and sensors, the virtualized computer system comprising:
a guest operating system executing in the virtual machine configured to support the touch-based input devices and the sensors;
a first guest application executing in the virtual machine that coordinates communications with the computing device that is remotely accessing the virtual machine and configured to receive events from the computing device and inject the events into one or more queues managed by the guest operating system; and
a second guest application executing in the virtual machine that is launched by the computing device and controlled by the computing device, wherein the second guest application is subscribed to some of the events injected into the one or more queues by the first guest application and generates an output in accordance therewith.
2. The virtualized computer system of claim 1 , wherein the one or more queues are character devices.
3. The virtualized computer system of claim 2 , wherein each of the character devices does not have an associated device driver.
4. The virtualized computer system of claim 3 , wherein a character device is configured for each of the input devices.
5. The virtualized computer system of claim 1 , wherein the second guest application is an application for making and receiving telephone calls and the events the second guest application is subscribed to are generated by microphone inputs at the computing device and the output that is generated includes audio from a connected telephone.
6. The virtualized computer system of claim 1 , wherein the second guest application is a three-dimensional (3D) game application and the events the second guest application is subscribed to are generated by touch-based inputs at the computing device and the output that is generated includes 3D graphics and audio.
7. The virtualized computer system of claim 1 , wherein the first guest application is further configured to extract a tag from each event and determine the input device that is associated with the event.
8. A virtualized computer system, comprising:
a virtual machine running in a server computer, wherein the virtual machine is remotely accessible by a computing device having input devices including a touch-based input device and sensors, the virtualized computer system comprising:
an operating system, executing in the computing device, configured to support the touch-based input devices and sensors; and
a client terminal application, executing in the computing device, configured to coordinate communications with the virtual machine, the virtual machine being subscribed to events generated by the input devices, the client terminal application configured to transmit to the virtual machine the events in native form along with a tag that identifies the input device that generated the event.
9. The virtualized computer system of claim 8 , wherein the sensors include any of global positioning system (GPS) sensor, accelerometer, magnetic field sensor, orientation sensor, temperature sensor, barometric pressure sensor, and gyroscopic sensor.