Model-Based Design for Multimodal Interaction in a VE

Abstract

The creation of virtual environments is often a lengthy and expensive process. Especially defining the interaction dialog between the user and the environment is a difficult task, as the communication is often multimodal by nature. In this chapter, we elaborate on an approach which facilitates the development of this kind of user interfaces. In particular, we propose a Model-Based User Interface Design process (MBUID), in which the interface is defined by means of high level notations, rather than by writing low level programming code. The approach lifts the design to a higher level of abstraction, resulting in a shortened development cycle leaving the opportunity for creating intermediate prototypes and user evaluation, ultimately resulting in better and cheaper virtual environment interfaces.