On user interfaces for educational multimedia applications

Abstract

The paper addresses two questions related to educational multimedia applications: (a) what lessons should we learn from today's graphical user interfaces (GUIs)?, and (b) what should the user interfaces should look like in the future? We address the first question by drawing on our experience from two multimedia projects, that deal with multimedia proceedings and multimedia lectures. For the second question, we criticize the directions that today's research for 3D and VR GUIs is going, and we argue that they may not necessarily be on the way to the optimum user interface, which is none, and we describe an alternative path.