cate. These places are often just a collection of objects, standing deaf in front of visitors. In many cases, objects are accompanied by textual descriptions, usually too short or long to be useful for the visitor. In the last decade, progress in multimedia has allowed for new, experimental forms of communication (using computer technologies) in public spaces. Implementations have ranged from s...

It is the goal of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) to hide computers from the users. Instead, everyday objects embedded with computer processing capability become smart objects that act as interfaces to computer software. A challenge with this new paradigm of computing is to create natural and obvious ways for people to interact with objects and receive output from the computer software that thes...

We present a visual approach to layout static components of user interfaces as hand-drawn compositions of simple geometric shapes, based on sketch recognition. We have defined a visual grammar using drawing data from target users, where we tried to figure out how people sketch interfaces and what combinations of shapes are more commonly used to define widgets. From these we built our grammar an...

This paper presents the approaches and expectations of a recently launched course at New York University (NYU) in the design and development of musical controllers. The framework for the course, which is also entitled “New Interfaces for Musical Expression,” is largely based on the proceedings of the first NIME workshop held in Seattle, WA in April 2001.

For the general public, the year 1984 marks the emergence of WIMP (Windows, Icon, Menu, Pointing device) interfaces. Developed at Xerox PARC in 1973 and popularized by the Macintosh, this type of graphical user interfaces is still largely used today, on most computers. However, in recent years, numerous scientific researches focus on post-WIMP interfaces. It is no longer limited to a single way...

Recent advances in speech recognition technology have raised hopes about the development of practical spoken natural language interfaces. Embedding the speech recognition technology within a sophisticated dialog processing mechanism can overcome many of the traditional problems in spoken natural language systems. This paper presents a theory of natural language dialog that enables: (1) robust b...

Is there a distinction between New Interfaces for Musical Expression and New Interfaces for Controlling Sound? This article begins with a brief overview of expression in musical performance, and examines some of the characteristics of effective “expressive” computer music instruments. It becomes apparent that sophisticated musical expression requires not only a good control interface but also v...

GEMINI (Generic Environment for Multilingual Interactive Natural Interfaces) is an EC funded research project, which has two main objectives: First, the development of a flexible platform able to produce user-friendly interactive multilingual and multi-modal dialogue interfaces to databases with a minimum of human effort, and, second, the demonstration of the platform’s efficiency through the d...

The EC funded research project GEMINI (Generic Environment for Multilingual Interactive Natural Interfaces) has two main objectives: On the one hand the development and implementation of a platform able to produce user-friendly interactive multilingual and multi-modal dialogue interfaces to databases with a minimum of human effort and on the other hand the demonstration of the platform’s effici...