9213823 Glinert This is the second year funding of a three-year continuing award with the objective of developing a theoretical basis for multimodal interface design. The basis for the investigation is the interplay between visual and auditory interface (graphics and sound) issues, and also the temporal and dynamic aspects of the abstract objects that are active in the interface. The simultaneous consideration of these aspects leads to the definition od an object-oriented construct called a metawidget which is an abstract object with built-in strategies which allow multiple different manners of manifesting themselves to the user. Among those modes of manifestation are image, sound or even combinations and sequences of the two media. The implementation will consist of suitable microworld environments for experimentation, used as testbeds for controlled experimentation to validate the theoretical aspects of the interface design process as they are developed. Prototypes of such microworlds include an animated editor for planar graphs and an enhanced multimodal interface for visually impaired - but not blind - users. These examples have been used as a preliminary approach to test potentially useful ideas.
