A Framework for Rapid Prototyping of Multimodal Interaction Concepts

Ubiquitous systems provide users with various possibilities of interacting with applications and components using different modalities and devices. To offer the most appropriate mode of interaction in a given context, various types of sensors are combined to create interactive applications. Thus, the need for integrated development and evaluation of suitable interaction concepts for ubiquitous systems increases. Creation of prototypes for interactions is a complex and time consuming part of iterative software engineering processes, currently not well supported by tools as prototypes are considered to be short-living software artifacts. In this paper, we introduce the framework Connect that enables rapid prototyping of interaction concepts with a focus on software engineering aspects. The framework allows the definition and modification of event-to-action mappings for arbitrary interaction devices and applications. By applying Connect, model-based prototypes of multimodal interaction concepts involving multiple devices can be created, evaluated and refined during the entire engineering process. ACM Classification