Multi-modal Interaction in Biomedicine - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 200

interaction capabilities within the same environment. We are now working on
deploying a Personal Space Station that will be capable to provide 'a multi-modal
desktop-VR interaction'.
Our current research goal is to build a system, which will give users a possi-
bility to switch between VR and desktop projection modalities without changing
devices and a workplace. We focused on the development of a mechanism to sup-
port simultaneously input and output modalities of both VR and desktop. This
will permit us to provide end-users of the VRE with a combined desktop-VR
version of the system. We expect that it will help to satisfy the wider range of
end-users and make their interaction with the VRE more intuitive. Our next
research step related to HCI will be to compare navigation, locomotion, manip-
ulation and measurement capabilities in VR and desktop projection modalities
with respect to users' satisfaction, performance and mistake inflicting. We plan
to use the VRE running on a PSS as a case study for this research.
The final research goal will be to develop a system able to dynamically
change the interaction style, adapting itself to the situation, preferences and
motor skills of each user. This system will be based on personalized interaction
metaphors [22].
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Robert Belleman, Denis Shamonin, Daniela
Gavidia, Roman Shulakov and Hans Ragas for their contribution to the develop-
ment of the VRE system. We also would like to acknowledge Dutch hospitals for
their participation in user profiling, as well as Henriette Cramer and Dr. Vanessa
Evers for their contribution to this research.
This work is partially sponsored by the EU CrossGrid Project IST-2001-
32243 and the Token 2000 project “Distributed Interactive Medical Exploratory
for 3D Medical Images.”
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