Multimodal User Interfaces in Ubiquitous Environments

Abstract

Ubiquitous technology is continually spreading computing and communication power in our life. Recent technological advances (including increasing availability of various types of interactive devices, sensors and communication technology) are more and more enabling novel interactive software to support users in several contexts for different objectives, by profiting from the resources available in smart environments. Users should be able to seamlessly access information and services regardless of the device they are using and/or their position, even when the system and/or the environment dynamically change. This creates challenges for designing the user interface, and several interaction modalities (e.g. graphical, vocal, gesture, tactile, ..) could be used for providing more natural interaction techniques supporting the ‘anytime–anyhow–anywhere’ paradigm. In this scenario, a particulrly important aspect is enabling the users to freely move about and naturally continue the interaction with the available applications through different devices (i.e. cell phones, PDAs, desktop computers, digital television sets, intelligent watches, ..) without having to start their session from scratch at each interaction device change. In this chapter we describe our solution for migratory interactive services which are able to address the above issue by means of three fundamental mechanisms: adapting and preserving the state of the software application parts dedicated to interaction with end users; supporting methods for application logic reconfiguration; and defining flexible mechanisms from the underlying network layers.