OpenInterface: A Lightweight Open Source Platform for Rapid Prototyping of Multimodal Applications

In this paper we present the OpenInterface Kernel as part of an open source platform for supporting the effective prototyping of multimodal interactive applications. Multimodal Interactive applications are based on the assembly of several components, namely, various and sometimes interchangeable modalities at the input, fusion-fission components and also several modalities at the output. Iterative design of such a system requires the easy integration, replacement or upgrade of components and the possibility to derive interaction properties from the component and basic ergonomic properties for the global system. We have designed a thin communication kernel able to manage this in an easy way by providing the research community a mean to solve a gap in the current support for multimodal applications implementation: OpenInterface Kernel is a practical light way to assemble various modalities with different implementation language, keeping a high level of performance of the assembled system. The effective connection of components requires their parsing in order to extract their communication features. Further parsing could be used to extract high level interaction properties. A running example illustrates the dynamic and extensible aspects of the platform. It runs on several operating systems and allows fast integration of interaction devices, signal processing tools, domainindependent data fusion, and dynamic runtime connection and re-configuration of interaction modalities.
Thales Research and Technology France, Paris
Proc. of 1st Int. Workshop on User Interface eXtensible Markup Language UsiXML'2010 (Berlin, 20 June 2010)
2010
121-130