Designing Pervasive and Multimodal Interactive Systems: An Approach Built on the Field

Abstract

The chapter is organized into five sections. The first section concerns related works. The SSW methodology section presents the design approach, introducing some considerations about the phenomena affecting the HCI process. The third section deals with the system architecture. The fourth section illustrates the annotation primitive operator. The fifth section describes the experiences gained on the field by illustrating several case studies: different scenarios are introduced in which experts have to afford complex problems (e.g. diagnoses, territorial portal organization, tourist guides organization, yard management) in a collaborative asynchronous way and using different devices (e.g. desktop PC, PDAs) to access their SSW from everywhere and in different working contexts. The implemented multimodal interactive environment permits experts to face the problems related to their activity, to update and manage a shared knowledge base and to adapt and evolve their virtual work environment by adding tools becoming unwitting programmer.