Expanding Interaction Potentials within Virtual Environments Investigating the Usability of Speech and Manual Input Modes for Decoupled Interaction.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Human-Computer Interaction Volume 2011, Article ID 565689, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2011/565689 Research Article Expanding Interaction Potentials within Virtual Environments: Investigating the Usability of Speech and Manual Input Modes for Decoupled Interaction Alex Stedmon, Victor Bayon, and Gareth Griffiths Virtual Reality Applications Research Team, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Correspondence should be addressed to Alex Stedmon, alex.stedmon@nottingham.ac.uk Received 28 April 2011; Revised 11 August 2011; Accepted 7 September 2011 Academic Editor: Armando Bennet Barreto Copyright © 2011 Alex Stedmon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Distributed technologies and ubiquitous computing now support users who may be detached or decoupled from traditional inter- actions. In order to investigate the potential usability of speech and manual input devices, an evaluation of speech input across dif- ferent user groups and a usability assessment of independent-user and collaborative-user interactions was conducted. Whilst the primary focus was on a formative usability evaluation, the user group evaluation provided a formal basis to underpin the academic rigor of the exercise. The results illustrate that using a speech interface is important in understanding user acceptance of such tech- nologies. From the usability assessment it was possible to translate interactions and make them compatible with innovative input devices. This approach to interaction is still at an early stage of development, and the potential or validity of this interfaci