Special
Issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
MULTIMODAL INTERACTION WITH
Editors: Stephen Brewster,
Mobile
devices have been one of the major success stories of computing in recent
years. Large numbers of people now carry a sophisticated computing device with
them all the time in the form of a mobile telephone or a personal digital
assistant. More sophisticated and powerful wearable computers are becoming
available and in the future will be embedded into the
clothes and accessories a user wears; these wearable computers have more power and flexibility for use in
different situations and with access to different media and services.
One of the key
problems for interaction with mobile and wearable devices is their impoverished
user interface when compared desktop computers. Screens are often small or non
existent and head-mounted displays are not always an option, so output is
limited. Small keyboards or touch screens can be hard to use for input when on
the move, making interaction hard.To make mobile and
wearable devices more effective and acceptable to users, and to allow a whole
new range of services to be delivered to people when on the move, the
challenges of input and output must be addressed. Multimodal interaction is one
way to enhance usability.
The
combination of vision, hearing and speech, and touch and gesture have great
possibilities for increasing the bandwidth of communication between user and
device (taste and smell are potential future contributors too). Flexible
multimodal interfaces may allow users to interact in a more natural manner.
This is particularly important for mobile and wearable devices as they are used
by a wide range of different people in a wide range of different situations.
They also have great possibilities for users with disabilities as they provide
alternatives to the standard GUI model which can be problematic.
Key issues
remain about how the different senses should be used, what each sense is good
for, how they should be combined and how to assess their performance in a
mobile setting. For this special issue we are keen to gather papers on the
state of the art in multimodal interface design for mobile and wearable devices
to try and answer some of these questions and to look towards the future of
multimodal interface design.
Themes
We are
soliciting papers that discuss novel multimodal techniques, methods, models and
tools to overcome the impoverished interfaces of the
current generation of mobile devices. We would like papers that bring together the following sorts of issues
in the mobile and wearable context:-
·
Auditory
interfaces using speech and non-speech sounds
·
Role
and efficacy of speech recognition
·
Gestural,
graspable, tactile, haptic and tangible interfaces
·
Vision
based interaction (e.g. navigation through glancing)
·
Physiological
input/output
·
Effective
combination of multiple modalities (both in theory and practice)
·
Evaluation
of multimodal systems
·
Multimodal
interfaces for disabled users
·
Novel
sensors and output devices to facilitate multimodal interaction
·
Novel
mobile services using multimodal interfaces
This list
is not exclusive; we are keen to receive papers on any novel combination of
modalities.
Submission format and schedule
Submissions
should be e-mailed as a PDF file (including images) directly to the editors of
the special issue. Information regarding journal submissions and formats is
available at: http://www.personal-ubicomp.com/
The
deadline for receiving submissions is
For further
information or to discuss a possible contribution, please contact the special
issue editors, Steve Brewster (
Deadlines.
Paper
Submission:
Notification
of acceptance:
Final
Corrections to papers:
Publication
of special issue: September 2004