*** 9625573 Jacob This project seeks to invent and implement a new model, abstraction, and language to provide a formal basis for describing and building next-generation user interfaces, which will involve parallel, continuous user-computer interactions. The next generation of emerging user-computer interaction styles has been called non-WIMP and is typified by parallel and continuous interactions, as seen in virtual reality or virtual environments. The project goal is to develop a model and abstraction that captures the formal structure of next-generation dialogues from the point of view of the user and the dialogue, rather than from the exigencies of the implementation in the way that existing techniques have captured command-based, textual, and event-based dialogues. Most current user interface description languages and software systems are based on serial, discrete, event-based interaction. Most of today's examples of non-WIMP interfaces have, of necessity, been designed and implemented with event-based models more suited to previous interface styles. Because those models fail to capture continuous, parallel interaction explicitly, the interfaces have required considerable ad-hoc, low-level, though highly inventive programming approaches. This work would ultimately be used by people who design and build user interfaces in virtual reality and other non-WIMP interaction styles. ***
