• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.135-146
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• 2006

Multimodal interfaces are recognition-based technologies that interpret and encode hand gestures, eye-gaze, movement pattern, speech, physical location and other natural human behaviors. Modality is the type of communication channel used for interaction. It also covers the way an idea is expressed or perceived, or the manner in which an action is performed. Multimodal Interfaces are the technologies that constitute multimodal interaction processes which occur consciously or unconsciously while communicating between human and computer. So input/output forms of multimodal interfaces assume different aspects from existing ones. Moreover, different people show different cognitive styles and individual preferences play a role in the selection of one input mode over another. Therefore to develop an effective design of multimodal user interfaces, input/output structure need to be formulated through the research of human cognition. This paper analyzes the characteristics of each human modality and suggests combination types of modalities, dual-coding for formulating multimodal interaction. Then it designs multimodal language and input synchronization method according to the granularity of input synchronization. To effectively guide the development of next-generation multimodal interfaces, substantially cognitive modeling will be needed to understand the temporal and semantic relations between different modalities, their joint functionality, and their overall potential for supporting computation in different forms. This paper is expected that it can show multimodal interface designers how to organize and integrate human input modalities while interacting with multimodal interfaces.