Research On Post-WIMP Software Interface

The progress of UI can be divided into three periods. Batch mode, Command Line and GUI, each kind of UI style has been dominate in the specific period. In each period, the corresponding UI style can extend the bandwidth of human-computer interaction to maximum extent, supply the convenience circumstance to communicate with computing resources, and improve the user's production. Until now, the GUI has dominated the UI field for about two decades. GUI bases on the Desktop metaphor and applies the WIMP paradigm. This kind of UI style has some obvious advantages than before, such as visualization of interaction object, minimum of syntax, fast semantic feedback. But with the improvement of hardware and software, GUI's disadvantages have become obvious. Now the research of next generation of UI has become the hot field. Researchers have put forward the Post-WIMP (Non-WIMP) user interface. In this thesis, the author aims at this field, does research on the Post-WIMP software interface.From the viewpoint of whole research, based on analysis of the common interaction characteristic of Post-WIMP, we start with two typical interaction styles: pen interaction and 3D interaction, to research the Post-WIMP software interface.In the theoretic level, this thesis performs the analysis and description for the common interaction characteristics. At first, the interaction tasks in pen interaction and 3D interaction are concluded. Then, Jacob's model[Jacob 1996] is applied to describe the continuous characteristic in pen-based interaction and 3D interaction. And a hierarchy model is applied to integrate the multi-dimension information in pen-based interaction and 3D interaction. This thesis analyses the creation process of interaction task in Post-WIMP environment, and present a framework to fulfill the implicit interaction in Post-WIMP environment which composes the recognition techniques, context-aware techniques and User-Mediation techniques.In the method level, this thesis does the research work in PIBG paradigm,including the description of the main idea of the paradigm, and the evaluation of this paradigm are declared in this thesis. At the same time, this thesis performs research on the pen-based 3D interaction. New research approach and interaction technique are presented.In the level of software architecture, this thesis presents the software framework in pen-based interaction and 3D interaction. Based on them, a software platform named in PIBG Toolkit is built to support the construction of Pen-based interaction systems. And pen-based 3D interaction platform and 3D interaction platform that aimed in virtual assembly field also built to support the construction of 3D interaction systems. Creative Pen system which will be discussed in part 7 is built on pen-based 3D interaction platform.The goal of this thesis is to research on pen-based interaction and 3D interaction Post-WIMP software interface from generic point of view, analyses the common interaction characteristics in Post-WIMP environment, and discuss the corresponding research approaches. Eventually, the research result will be applied in the development process about Post-WIMP software.