Multimodal interactions: Embedding new meanings to known forms and objects

Abstract

The way we are experiencing and interacting with our everyday living environment define and anticipate our future behavior and actions. Today new digital technologies vastly diminish boundaries between virtual and physical world. Cross-reality design supported with recent mobile and context aware computing, gradually changed the concept of user interaction and moved it more toward usage of heterogeneous contexts, pervasive computing technologies, and multimodal spatial perception and transformed our living surroundings into smart environments, traditional living object into smart living objects. Ubiquitous computing vision implies more than ever to our lives. In order to make all these changes more human-centered in this paper we are investigated the cognitive and metaphorical aspects of future interface design strategies which could enhance user experience and ideas acceptance, communicated through multimodal interactions. In this paper we are presenting three tangible interfaces that we have developed for design and research purposes and results we collected during their public exposure. Hopefully, the results will give us sufficient insights for further investigations in the field of smart living environments and smart objects development. We believe that to fulfill these goals application and exploration of tangible interfaces frameworks and cognitive methods could be one of the crucial elements for the future research success.