GestureAgents: An Agent-Based Framework for Concurrent Multi-Task Multi-User Interaction

While the HCI community has been putting a lot of effort on creating physical interfaces for collaboration, studying multi-user interaction dynamics and creating specific applications to support (and test) this kind of phenomena, it has not addressed the problem of having multiple applications sharing the same interactive space. Having an ecology of rich interactive programs sharing the same interfaces poses questions on how to deal with interaction ambiguity in a cross-application way and still allow different programmers the freedom to program rich unconstrained interaction experiences. This paper describes GestureAgents, a framework demonstrating several techniques that can be used to coordinate different applications in order to have concurrent multi-user multi-tasking interaction and still dealing with gesture ambiguity across multiple applications.