Interaction patterns for future interactive systems components

Abstract The development of future interactive systems (FIS) is in its infancy, so detailed guides describing the process to design them hardly exist. This may be due to the fact that their development is quite recent and what their components are and how they must be combined to develop a FIS are not yet clear or widely accepted. Our approach towards a thorough understanding of FIS was to analyse the different types of FIS and to extract general characteristics, which can be considered generic, in order to describe what a FIS consists of and how it works. In this paper, we present a classification of the components of a generic FIS and propose interactive behaviour patterns, which can be used to design the FIS components more easily. These patterns are part of the SENDA framework, which was defined to facilitate the rigorous development of a specific kind of FIS, which is Virtual Environments (VEs). The results obtained from the application of the proposed patterns to VEs development are also presented.