Towards a unified framework for modeling, dispatching, and interpreting uncertain input

Many new input technologies (such as touch and voice) hold the promise of more natural user interfaces. However, many of these technologies create inputs with some uncertainty. Unfortunately, conventional infrastructure lacks a method for easily handling uncertainty, and as a result input produced by these technologies is often converted to conventional events as quickly as possible, leading to a stunted interactive experience. Our ongoing work aims to design a unified framework for modeling uncertain input and dispatching it to interactors. This should allow developers to easily create interactors which can interpret uncertain input, give the user appropriate feedback, and accurately resolve any ambiguity. This abstract presents an overview of the design of a framework for handling input with uncertainty and describes topics we hope to pursue in future work. We also give an example of how we built highly accurate touch buttons using our framework. For examples of what interactors can be built and a more detailed description of our framework we refer the reader to [8].