This paper proposes a generic interactive system architecture describing in a structured way, both hardware and software components of an interactive system. It makes explicit all the components that play a role in the information processing from input devices to the interactive application and back to the output devices. Along with the generic interactive system architecture the paper proposes a process for selecting and connecting those components in order to tune the generic interactive system architecture for a specific interactive application. This select, connect and tune-on-demand approach helps handle complexity of interactive applications featuring innovative interaction techniques by splitting the interactive software into dedicated functional components. It also supports design flexibility by making explicit the components impacted when the interaction design evolves. This interactive system architecture and its related process have been applied to the development of several real-life interactive systems and we illustrate their application on an interactive application offering multi-mice, multi-touch and leap motion interactions in the context of interactive cockpits of large civil aircrafts.
Representing the behavior of multi-touch interactive systems in a complete, concise and non-ambiguous way is still a challenge for formal description techniques. Indeed, multitouch interactive systems embed specific constraints that are either cumbersome or impossible to capture with classical formal description techniques. This is due to both the idiosyncratic nature of multi-touch technology (e.g. the fact that each finger represent an input device and that gestures are directly performed on the surface without an additional instrument) and the high dynamicity of interactions usually encountered in this kind of systems. This paper presents a formal description technique able to model multi-touch interactive systems. We focus the presentation on how to represent the dynamic instantiation of input devices (i.e. finger) and how they can then be exploited dynamically to offer a multiplicity of interaction techniques which are also dynamically instantiated.
Interactive cockpits have been used since the early 00's in many aircraft cockpits, but the use of interactivity still remains limited to non-critical functions even in the most recent aircrafts. Indeed, engineering such interactive systems is still a challenge and their engineering has not reach the Design Assurance Level required for critical functions. In interactive cockpits, interaction takes place through graphical input devices and keyboards (such as the Keyboard Cursor Control Unit in Airbus family) while the behavior of the User Interface (UI) must be compliant with the specifications defined in ARINC 661 standard. The tool-supported threefold approach presented in this paper proposes means for increasing the assurance level of interactive systems. The approach includes a formal description technique for describing each component of an interactive system (detection and prevention of development faults), a command and monitoring technique dedicated to interactive systems components (detection of natural faults) and a segregation runtime environment (prevention of faults propagation) We report on the implementation of a Flight Control Unit (FCU) panel using this approach, inspired by the FCU of the A380.
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