Conveying Multimodal Interaction Possibilities through the use of Appearances

With the increasing importance of computers in all areas of life, new and innovative interaction concepts gain importance as current windows, icons, menus, and pointing concepts are rendered unusable. Well known graphical user interface currently move towards enhanced and multimodal interaction capabilities. In this paper we describe our approach to support this transition by extending graphical interfaces with multimodal interaction capabilities. Major aspects we focus on are the conveyance of the usable modalities as well as the fluent transitions between different modality combinations when the interaction context changes.