Enriching the user experience with multimodal interfaces
Albert Ali Salah, Thierry Dutoit · Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces · 2011
In the age of technical specialization, research into multimodal interfaces presents particular logistic challenges in bringing together technical expertise in different modalities, in multimodal fusion, and in integration. Data collection and usability studies are time consuming and require a further set of skills, as well as manpower. To meet these challenges, the eNTERFACE’10 Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces brought together 65 researchers from 18 countries in Amsterdam, for the duration of four weeks. This special issue features three research papers that were initiated as projects at the eNTERFACE’10,1 and extended during the six months that followed the workshop. The eNTERFACE Workshops have been places for initiating international, long-term collaborations. The paper “Automatic Fingersign-to-Speech Translation System is written by such a group, where some of the members have been working together since the first eNTERFACE in 2005. In this paper, the authors describe a system for helping the communication of visually-impaired and hearing-impaired people, by converting speech to fingerspelling and fingerspelling to speech. The multi-national nature of the team is revealed in the experimental setup, where the authors report