The visual interface for the NITE workbench:
a tool for annotating natural interactivity and multimodal data
N.O. Bernsen, L. Dybkjær and M. Kolodnytsky
Natural Interactive Systems Laboratory, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
NITE (Natural Interactivity Tools Engineering) is a European HLT (Human Language Technologies) project which aims to develop a workbench, or an integrated toolset, for annotating and analysing natural interactive communicative behavior between humans, as well as between humans and machines (systems). NITE began its work in April 2001 and has a duration of two years. The NITE project partners are: NISLab (Odense, Denmark), DFE (Barcelona, Spain), DFKI (Saarbrücken, Germany), HCRC (Edinburgh, UK), ILC (Pisa, Italy), IMS (Stuttgart, Germany) and Noldus Information Technology (Wageningen, The Netherlands).
The vision of natural interactivity is that of enabling systems to exchange information with humans in the same ways in which humans exchange information with one another, i.e. through speech, facial expression (including lip movements and gaze), hand and arm gesture, bodily posture and (to a limited extent) touch. Moreover, extending their use of gesture, humans exchange information through creating and manipulating objects, including objects which themselves represent information, such as images or written text. The natural interactivity vision comes with two claims: (1) that the ease and intuitiveness of human-human-system interaction could be improved tremendously through natural interaction, and (2) that pursuing natural interactivity will lead to completely new families of applications which cannot be realised through traditional graphical user interfaces with a screen, mouse and keyboard.
This talk will present the NITE consortium's analysis of present user needs for a natural interactivity coding tool, and then proceed to present and illustrate the state of ongoing work on the tool's user interface for standard users. The work is based on the following high-level interface specification. The tool should:
Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2002
, 4th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral
Research, 27-30 August 2002, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © 2002
Noldus Information Technology bv