ABSTRACT
Current state-of-the-art on Multimodals Environments (MEs) concerns mainly virtual environments (VEs) and hyper-instruments (Machover and Chung, 1989; Mulder, 1994). Hyper-instruments can be considered to be a particular kind of VE based on sound instead of visual feedback. Most existing VEs and Hyper-instruments are a sort of static virtual world which can only be “navigated”: they do not change their structure and behaviour over time and do not adapt themselves to users, they do not try to guess what the user is doing or wants. Exceptions are ALIVE (Maes et al., 1995), Placeholder (Laurel et al., 1994) where the user can leave traces of her actions and, in certain aspects, the interactive music Cypher (see the chapter by Robert Rowe in this volume). Interactive music systems involving hyper-instruments and gesture interaction are, receiving a growing interest by composers and artists (Rowe, 1993; Mulder, 1994; Povall, 1995; Winkler, 1995).
