Today's multimedia infrastructures adopt a centralized approach, where all multimedia processing takes place within a single system. The network is, at best, used for streaming data transmission. Since there is a strong trend towards networked systems, these traditional approaches are becoming obsolete. In contrast, the Network-Integrated Multimedia Middleware (NMM) offers a multimedia architecture, which considers the network as an integral part and enables the intelligent use of devices distributed across the network.

We describe a hybrid building navigation system consisting of stationary information booths and a mobile communication infrastructure feeding small portable devices. The graphical presentations for both the booths and the mobile devices are generated from a common source and for the common task of way finding, but they use different techniques to convey possibly different subsets of the relevant information. The form of the presentations is depending on technical limitations of the output media, accuracy of location information, and cognitive restrictions of the user. We analyze what information needs to be conveyed, how limited resources influence the presentation of this information, and argue, that by generating all different presentations in a common framework, a consistent appearance across devices can be achieved and that the different device classes can complement each other in facilitating the navigation task.