This book is a collection of 11 loosely coupled research papers. Its main focus is on the design of user interfaces for computer electronics that enable natural interactions between users and systems. Unfortunately, though this is an emerging and important topic, I do not believe that this book will be able to create additional interest in the subject. The book’s title states that it discusses “principles, methods, and applications.” The book itself provides no such subdivision, however. It is up to the reader, who for example may be interested in applications, to find the papers that discuss this aspect of multimedia interactions.

The common thread of all of the papers in the book is the search for more interactive user interfaces. Since each paper addresses a very specific aspect of this search, however, individual papers will be of greater benefit to most readers than will the collection as a whole. The book also provides no criteria for the selection of the given papers. Because of this overall lack of organization and structure, I believe that this book’s audience is, unfortunately, mostly limited to current practitioners in the field. It is certainly not a textbook, and I cannot recommend it for readers who are new to this area of study.