MVIC – An MVC Extension for Interactive, Multimodal Applications

Abstract

MVC is considered an important architectural patterns when it comes to interactive applications since its invention in the days of Smalltalk. However, interaction with computers has changed. Touch-screens are as natural to users nowadays as mouse and keyboard have been for the past decades of computing and HCI-researchers keep on developing more interaction modalities. Multimodal applications pose major challenges to software engineers who have to deal with different ways for users to express the same intention. MVC does not incorporate the flexibility needed to cope with multimodal applications as it makes the controller component responsible for interaction interpretation and managing the application flow. We propose MVIC, an extension to MVC dedicated to provide a solid software architecture for multimodal, interactive applications by introducing a dedicated interaction component.