Issues in measuring the benefits of multimodal interfaces

Multimedia interfaces are rapidly evolving to facilitate human/machine communication. Most of the technologies on which they are based are, as yet, imperfect. But, the interfaces do begin to allow information exchange in ways familiar and comfortable to the human-principally through natural actions in the sensory dimensions of sight, sound and touch. Further, as digital networking becomes ubiquitous, the opportunity grows for collaborative work through conferenced computing. In this context the machine takes on the role of mediator in human/machine/human communication-the ideal being to extend the intellectual abilities of humans through access to distributed information resources and collective decision making. The challenge is how to design machine mediation so that it extends, not impedes, human abilities. This report describes evolving work to incorporate multimodal interfaces into a networked system for collaborative distributed computing. It also addresses strategies for quantifying the synergies that may be gained.