Natural interaction in ambient intelligent environments
Constantine Stephanidis · 2011
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) constitutes an evolution of Information and Communication Technologies which responds to the current increasing demand for anytime anywhere availability of information and electronic services. AmI technologies integrate sensing capabilities, processing power, reasoning mechanisms, networking facilities, applications and services, digital content, and actuating capabilities distributed in the environment. While a wide variety of different technologies is involved, the goal of AmI is to either entirely hide their presence from users or to smoothly integrate them within the surrounding context as enhanced environment artifacts, rather than as technological gadgets. The pervasiveness of interaction in AmI environments requires the elaboration of new interaction concepts that extend beyond the current user interface concepts like the desktop metaphor and menu driven interfaces. AmI will therefore bring about new interaction techniques, as well as novel uses and multimodal combinations of existing advanced techniques, such as, for example, gestures and localisation. Additionally, interaction is embedded in everyday objects and smart artifacts. This concept refers to interfaces that use physical artifacts as objects for representation and interaction, seamlessly integrating the physical and digital worlds. Interaction in AmI environments inherently relies on multimodal input, implying that it combines various user input modes, such as speech, pen, touch, manual gestures, gaze and head and body movements, as well as more than one output modes, primarily in the form of visual and auditory feedback. In this context, adaptive multimodality is prominent to support natural input in a dynamically changing context-of-use, adaptively offering to users the most appropriate and effective input forms at the current interaction context.