MEMODULES as tangible shortcuts to multimedia information

Abstract

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) are emerging as a new paradigm for facilitating user interaction with the digital world by providing intuitive means to link the physical and digital worlds. The MEMODULES project has the objective of developing, experimenting and evaluating the concept of tangible shortcuts (reminders), facilitating (a) the control of devices in the everyday life and also (b) the categorization of information in order to ease or improve information access and retrieval. The project aims at facilitating the user interaction with multimedia information by supporting both the creation and management of tangible links to digital content. Moreover, our research investigates the opportunity of a more complex, multi-sensorial combination of objects and multimedia information by combining multiple interaction modalities - such as voice and gesture - with interactive information visualizations. In order to address these issues we propose a user-oriented framework, called Memodules Framework, enabling end users to turn everyday objects into Memodules. The framework provides a single platform that combines end-user programming, tangible interaction, multimodality and personal information management issues. Memodules framework is built upon MemoML (Memodules Markup Language) and SMUIML (Synchronized Multimodal User Interaction Markup Language) models, which guarantee framework flexibility, extensibility and evolution over time. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.