A Component-Based Approach: ICARE Workshop: The Future of User Interface Design Tools

INTRODUCTION Parallel to the development of the Graphical User Interface technology, natural language processing, computer vision, 3-D sound, and gesture recognition have made significant progress. In addition recent interaction paradigms such as perceptual User Interface (UI) [13], tangible UI [8], embodied UI [7] and Augmented Reality (AR) open a vast world of possibilities for interaction modalities including modalities based on the manipulation of physical objects and modalities based on the manipulation of a PDA and so on. Since the seminal “Put that there” demonstrator [2] that combines speech, gesture and eye tracking, significant achievements have been made in terms of both modalities and real multimodal systems. We distinguish two types of modalities: the active and passive modalities. For inputs, active modalities are used by the user to issue a command to the computer (e.g., a voice command). Passive modalities are used to capture relevant information for enhancing the realization of the task, information that is not explicitly expressed by the user to the computer such as eye tracking in the “Put that there” demonstrator [2] or location tracking for a mobile user.