Multimodal interaction for pedestrians: an evaluation study

What are the most suitable interaction paradigms for navigational and informative tasks for pedestrians? Is there an influence of social and situational context on multimodal interaction? Our study takes a closer look at a multimodal system on a handheld device that was recently developed as a prototype for mobile navigation assistance. The system allows visitors of a city to navigate, to get information on sights, and to use and manipulate map information. In an outdoor evaluation, we studied the usability of such a system on site. The study yields insight about how multimodality can enhance the usability of hand-held devices with their future services. We show, for example that for our more complicated tasks multimodal interaction is superior to classical unimodal interaction.