Multimodal interaction techniques in scientific data visualization: An analytical survey

The interpretation process of complex data sets makes the integration of effective interaction techniques crucial. Recent work in the field of human-computer interaction has shown that there is strong evidence that multimodal user interaction, i.e. the integration of various input modalities and interaction techniques into one comprehensive user interface, can improve human performance when interacting with complex data sets. However, it is still unclear which factors make these user interfaces superior to unimodal user interfaces. The contribution of this work is an analytical comparison of a multimodal and a unimodal user interface for a scientific visualization application. We show that multimodal user interaction with simultaneously integrated speech and gesture input improves user performance regarding efficiency and ease of use.