Comunicar: Designing multimodal interaction for advanced in-vehicle interface

The paper reports on the work done in the initial phases of the European InformationSociety and Technology (IST) Project Comunicar. Eleven partners co-operate in theproject, including leading European car industry, suppliers, and universities.Comunicar has the ambitious goal of designing a multimodal driver-vehicle interfacethat integrates a large number of state of the art services and devices. Theintroduction of such systems puts forward a number of problems related to potentialinterference with the primary task of driving, ease of use, and acceptance for endusers. The approach adopted here was to define the initial specifications for thedesign of multimodal interaction compliant with the major findings stemming fromthe Human Factors research tradition.