Natural Interaction in Computer-mediated Environments (NICE)

The central vision of the Strategic Research Orientation NICE is to make interactions between users and technologies as easy, efficient and engaging as possible. The full gamut of research issues is considered within the multidisciplinary research teams within NICE, covering both technology oriented research and human centered research. The main research challenge is to study and build natural, intelligent interactive systems that people enjoy interacting with.

Technological development is therefore inspired or even founded on knowledge, features, or functional specifications of humans. Characteristics of users are studied and exploited to take into account both the strength and limitations of humans when designing systems.

We group the research challenges within NICE into three areas. The first (multi-media technology) is technology oriented whereas the second (human centered interaction) starts from the human point of view. The third area that looks at the challenge from a more global perspective dealing with the tools and methods for interaction design.