Multisensory Interaction

Multisensory interaction is an HCI research area concerned with designing and studying systems that engage two or more human senses - sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, proprioception - simultaneously or in combination. It differs from multimodal interaction (which typically emphasizes multiple input/output channels for the same semantic content) by foregrounding the perceptual integration of heterogeneous sensory stimuli. Multisensory interaction is central to accessibility because richer sensory substitution and redundancy provide alternative routes to information for people with sensory impairments, and because non-standard sensory profiles (e.g., synaesthesia, autism, deafblindness) require systems that can flexibly combine modalities.