Working conference on Advanced visual interfaces

The AVI conferences started here, in Rome on 1992, and were held every two years since then. The broad area of HCI has been expanding due to the fact that more persons wanted/needed to use computers, personal (one for each person) and now public as in Ambient Intelligence applications where the computing chips are integrated with the environment. In all applications on computing systems, the essential, wanted working feature, is how to make interaction simple both when learning it and using it so as to find the best way to interact with it. It is here that the interface plays a fundamental role and our conferences have suggested modeling, implementing and evaluating different suggested designs. Starting from the users, their habits and expectations and ending (or even redesigning) after usability testing. Many different cultures are brought together in this process: computer scientists, information architects, psychologists and semiologists: they are all involved since the background knowledge of users (technical, artistic, humanistic, etc) plays an important role in understanding (and remembering), how to use a computer application. The variety of new technological interaction devices like mouse, track pad, joystick, eye follower and the importance of the user recognizing the working mode he/she is in are all different aspects of one complex situation in which new programs are offered every day to be deployed to achieve significant tasks from word processing to using smart mobile phones. New interaction approaches, which do not use human vision, based on haptics, on speech recognition, are now competing with visual interfaces