ABSTRACT
When the Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2) declaration of intent was submitted in March 1999 to the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), as an answer to the first call for proposals around a new research instrument referred to as National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR), research in multimodal human-computer interaction was still in its early stages. Ideas for research in multimodal human-computer interaction had emerged about twenty years earlier, with, for instance, Richard Bolt’s “Put-That-There” application which aimed at combining spoken commands and pointing gestures to replace a keyboard (Bolt, 1980). However, this application, and other contemporary attempts, operated in a very constrained environment and tried to exploit immature mono-modal technologies.
