Cybercartography: A multimodal approach

Cartography is primarily a visual discipline. The concept of Cybercartography, however, helps move cartography beyond the visual modality with the ultimate goal of using all sensory modalities. To this end, Cybercartography permits us to migrate from a unimodal visual approach to a multimodal approach capitalizing upon combinations of sensory modalities, such as visual, auditory, and touch. The main reasons for developing multimodal interfaces are to help users achieve more efficient, natural, usable and easy to learn ways of interacting with computer applications, such as electronic maps. Furthermore, by offering users more extensive computing capabilities, multimodal interfaces permit more empowering applications relative to traditional interfaces. Such empowerment would be exemplified by a dynamic electronic map system, which could be interacted with using auditory, touch, and visual senses. Research is less advanced concerning the relationships between the map symbols and their meaning for nonvisual modalities (e.g., sound and haptic) than for the visual modality. This chapter examines the potential contribution of four nonvisual modalities to enhanced cartographic visualization. Specifically, these modalities are: speech, gesture, sound, and haptic (i.e., touch). Each of these four modalities is discussed in terms of their: (1) relative advantages and limits; (2) unimodal application; (3) multimodal application; and (4) cognitive workload implications