Nouvelle génération d'Interfaces Homme-Machine pour mieux agir et mieux comprendre. (New generation of Human-Computer Interfaces for improving decisions and understanding)

This paper describes ICON, a novel editor designed toconfigure a set of input devices and connect them to actionsinto a graphical interactive application. ICON allowsphysically challenged users to connect alternative inputdevices and/or configure their interaction techniquesaccording to their needs. It allows skilled users – graphicdesigners or musicians for example – to configure anyICON aware application to use their favorite input devicesand interaction techniques (bimanual, voice enabled, etc.). ICON works with Java Swing and requires applications todescribe their interaction styles in terms of ICON modules.By using ICON, users can adapt more deeply than beforetheir applications and programmers can easily provideextensibility to their applications. KeywordsMultiple inputs, input devices, interaction techniques,toolkits, assistive technologies INTRODUCTIONToday, interactive desktop applications manage a verylimited set of input devices, typically one mouse and onekeyboard. However, the population of users requiring orsimply possessing alternative input devices is growing, aswell as the number of new devices available. Given the proliferation of input devices and the importanceof tasks performed by users on a computer, being able toadapt an existing application to one or several input devicesis an important issue for physically challenged users,musicians, video game players, graphic artists etc. Theseusers find their environment more usable or simplyimproved when they use their favorite input devices withexisting applications. However, the complexity of supporting alternative inputdevices is currently very high: each application has toexplicitly implement some code to manage each device andall the desired interaction techniques using these devices.At best, specialized applications support a limited set ofdevices suited to their task. In this paper, we describe ICON (Input Configurator), asystem for selecting alternative input devices andconfiguring their interaction techniques interactively. Using ICON, users can connect additional input devices –such as tablets, voice recognition software, assistive devicesor electronic musical instruments – to an ICON awareapplication and/or assign specific interactive behavior toconnected devices. Figure 1 shows a typical configuration. Figure 1: Screenshot of ICON showing part of the configurationof a drawing editor. The right mouse changes the selected tooland keypad keys change the color and line width attributes.Mouse relative positions are added and sent to a “cursor”module that abstracts a 2D locator device.51