Building Multimodal Interfaces Out of Executable, Model-Based Interactors and Mappings

Future interaction will be embedded into smart environments offering the user to choose and to combine a heterogeneous set of interaction devices and modalities based on his preferences realizing an ubiquitous and multimodal access. We propose a model-based runtime environment (the MINT Framework) that describes multimodal interaction by interactors and multimodal mappings. The interactors are modeled by using state machines and describe user interface elements for various modalities. Mappings combine these interactors with interaction devices and support the definition of multimodal relations. We prove our implementation by modeling a multimodal navigation supporting pointing and hand gestures. We additionally present the flexibility of our approach that supports modeling of common interaction paradigms such as drag-and-drop as well.