Firm foundation in the main hci principles, the book provides a working

9.1 Non-WIMP/Natural/Multimodal Interfaces
In Chapter 4, we studied the process of HCI design, and after con-
sidering various requirements, user characteristics, and operating 
* 
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a concept where everyday objects are embedded with 
Internet capability so that the object information can be accessed and controlled.

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H U M A N – C O M P U T E R I N T E R A C T I O N 
constraints, we found that the available interface choices were limited, 
as we had to consolidate different possible solutions according to the 
restrictions imposed by the practical limitations of the computing plat-
forms available today (e.g., WIMP for desktop and touch-based for 
smartphones). However, the future will bring the development of many 
different computing platforms, and we are bound to have more choices, 
including non-WIMP-type of interfaces that will provide more natural 
and multimodal interfaces. One of the main reasons these non-WIMP 
interfaces have not yet made it into the mainstream, despite the appar-
ent need, is the lack of robustness and accuracy, or from another per-
spective, the relatively large amount of computation required to achieve 
them. However, the situation is changing due to continued technologi-
cal innovation and the emergence of the cloud computing infrastruc-
ture. In the light of this trend, we now review and assess the future of 
these HCI technologies one by one, including language understanding, 
gesture recognition, image recognition, and multimodal interaction.
9.1.1 Language Understanding
The talking computer interface is undoubtedly the holy grail of HCI. 
Language understanding can be largely divided into two processes. 
The first is recognizing the individual words, and the second is making 
New Sensors
Displays
Sensor Network
Ubiquitous
Cloud/Interaction Client
Simple and Fast
Affective/Personal
High-End Interaction
Big Data and
Personalization
Cloud-Client
Middleware
Experiential/Multimodal
Mixed/Virtual
Reality
Natural UI
Mobile Interface