The 3D components of today's user interfaces are still underdeveloped. Direct interaction with 3D objects has been limited thus far to gestural picking, manipulation with linear transformations, and simple camera motion. Further, there are no toolkits for building 3D user interfaces. We present a system which allows experimentation with 3D widgets, encapsulated 3D geometry and behavior. Our widgets are first-class objects in the same 3D environment used to develop the application. This integration of widgets and application objects provides a higher bandwidth between interface and application than exists in more traditional UI toolkit-based interfaces. We hope to allow user-interface designers to build highly interactive 3D environments more easily than is possible with today's tools. Keywords User Interface Design, Widgets, 3D Interaction, Virtual Reality 1 Introduction Modern user-interface software is built using widgets, objects with geometry and behavior used to control the ap...

Research on model-based user interface development tools is about 10 years old. Many approaches and prototype systems have been investigated in universities and research laboratories around the world. This paper proposes a generic architecture for these tools, reviews the different approaches in light of this architecture, and discusses their progress towards the goals of increasing the quality and reducing the cost of developing interfaces. The paper closes with a discussion of challenges for future model-based development tools. Keywords Model-based interface development, automatic user interface generation, user interface design.

A multi-user Virtual World has been implemented combining a flexible-object simulator with a multisensory user interface, including hand motion and gestures, speech input and output, sound output, and 3-D stereoscopic graphics with head-motion parallax. The implementation is based on a distributed client/server architecture with a centralized Dialogue Manager. The simulator is inserted into the Virtual World as a server. A discipline for writing interaction dialogues provides a clear conceptual hierarchy and the encapsulation of state. This hierarchy facilitates the creation of alternative interaction scenarios and shared multiuser environments.

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Recognition technologies are being used extensively in both the commercial and research worlds. But recognizers are still error-prone, and this results in performance problems and brittle dialogues. These problems are a barrier to acceptance and usefulness of recognition systems. Better interfaces to recognition systems, which can help to reduce the burden of recognition errors, are difficult to build because of lack of knowledge about the ambiguity inherent in recognition. We have extended a user interface toolkit in order to model and to provide structured support for ambiguity at the input event level [7]. This makes it possible to build re-usable interface components for resolving ambiguity and dealing with recognition errors. These interfaces can help to reduce the negative effects of recognition errors. By providing these components at a toolkit level, we make it easier for application writers to provide good support for error handling. And we can explore new types of interfaces for resolving a more varied range of ambiguity.

Animations express a sense of process and continuity that is difficult to convey through other techniques. Although interfaces can often benefit from animation, User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) rarely provide the tools necessary to easily support complex, state-dependent application output, such as animations. Here we describe Player, an interface component that facilitates sequencing these animations. One difficulty of integrating animations into interactive systems is that animation scripts typically only work in very specific contexts. Care must be taken to establish the required context prior to executing an animation. Player employs a precondition and postcondition-based specification language, and automatically computes which animation scripts should be invoked to establish the neces- sary state. Player's specification language has been designed to make it easy to express the desired behavior of animation controllers. Since planning can be a timeconsuming process inappr...

. The research work presented here belongs in the domain of formal specification of human-software interaction. More precisely, we are concerned by the applying a formal specification technique in the various stages of the construction of an user-driven application, the kind supported by most of the current UIMS. We use the Interactive Cooperative Objects (ICO) formalism, in which structural (or static) aspects are described in an object-oriented framework and dynamic (or behavioral) aspects are described with high-level Petri-nets. The formalism, a case study and some of its expected benefits are presented here. 1 Introduction The specific problems related to the engineering of user-driven interfaces are now widely recognized and well identified. Theoretical and practical work in this area are numerous, and, although starting from the same empirical evidences, present very various solutions [Abowd 90, Paterno 93, Harrison 93]. In spite of this diversity, some constants are standing o...

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The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a natural candidate for user interface (UI) modelling since it is the standard notation for object oriented modelling of applications. However, it is by no means clear how to model UIs using UML. This paper presents a user interface modelling case study using UML. This case study identifies some aspects of UIs that cannot be modelled using UML notation, and a set of UML constructors that may be used to model UIs. The modelling problems indicate some weaknesses of UML for modelling UIs, while the constructors exploited indicate some strengths. The identification of such strengths and weaknesses can be used in the formulation of a strategy for extending UML to provide greater support for user interface design.

ion means the logical separation of the code of a groupware application into the functional core and the user interface part. Development of synchronous groupware is thought to benefit from abstraction. Users take on (sometimes several different) roles in groupware settings. Access rights are often dictated by the roles of the different users. Evidently, groupware tools should strive to aid programmers in tackling such complexities. We also found three surveys on groupware design issues [24, 51, 15] helpful when trying to get an impression of groupware developers' needs. Finally, some results from a closely related field: Researchers working on developing tools for singleuser user interfaces suggest that the following are desirable features of programming languages for implementing such systems [40]: ffl Efficient runtime execution. ffl Fast translation or compilation. ffl Portability to, and availability on, a wide range of platforms. ffl Facilities to support reuse. ffl Strong typ...