Abstract

EMBASSI is a joint research project with 19 partners from industry and academia. Its focus is the development of new paradigms and architectures for the intuitive interaction with technical infrastructures of everyday life, such as home entertainment and control, public terminals, and car infotainment systems. As a so-called focus project, EMBASSI is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and addresses innovative methods of man–machine interaction, where “machine” explicitly refers to technical systems consisting of a variety of distributed, networked devices.

EMBASSI aims at enhancing the interaction with these infrastructures by providing intelligent assistance, multimodal interaction, and anthropomorphic user interfaces within a unified framework. Technical development in EMBASSI is based on a user centered approach, with accompanying psychological and ergonomics research.

A primary objective of the project is to establish an “EMBASSI layer” that extends recently developed networking standards like HAVi, UPnP, or Konnex towards user-centered, goal-based interaction by merging experiences from knowledge based AI systems with those coming from device oriented command and control architectures. This layer will enable the unification of interaction paradigms and will assist the user by enabling “natural” or “intuitive” commands instead of forcing the user to think in terms of device functions.

Author Keywords: Man–machine interaction; Assistance; Multi-media; Multi(poly-)modal interaction; Semantic protocol

Article Outline

1. Motivation

2. The EMBASSI project

2.1. Function-based vs. goal-based interaction

2.2. Multimodal and anthropomorphic interaction

3. The EMBASSI architecture

3.1. General concepts

3.2. The MMI levels

3.3. The assistance levels

3.4. Dynamic configuration

3.5. Lower level protocols

4. The EMBASSI modalities

4.1. Input modalities

4.2. Output modalities

4.3. Modalities for specific user groups

4.4. Multi(poly)modality

5. EMBASSI applications

5.1. Home environment

5.2. Automotive environment

5.3. Public terminals environment

6. Summary

Acknowledgements

References