Modelling fusion of modalities in multimodal interactive systems with MMMM

Several models and design spaces have been defined and are regularly used to describe how modalities can be fused together in an interactive multimodal system. However, models such as CASE, the CARE properties or TYCOON have all been defined more than two decades ago. In this paper, we start with a critical review of these models, which notably highlighted a confusion between how the user and the system side of a multimodal system were described. Based on this critical review, we define MMMM v1, an improved model for the description of multimodal fusion in interactive systems targeting completeness. A first user evaluation comparing the models revealed that MMMM v1 was indeed complete, but at the cost of user friendliness. Based on the results of this first evaluation, an improved version of MMMM, called MMMM v2 was defined. A second user evaluation highlighted that this model achieved a good balance between complexity, consistency and completeness compared to the state of the art.