XIM-engine: a software framework to support the development of interactive applications that uses conscious and unconscious reactions in immersive mixed reality

The development of systems that allow multimodal interpretation of human-machine interaction is crucial to advance our understanding and validation of theoretical models of user behavior. In particular, a system capable of collecting, perceiving and interpreting unconscious behavior can provide rich contextual information for an interactive system. One possible application for such a system is in the exploration of complex data through immersion, where massive amounts of data are generated every day both by humans and computer processes that digitize information at different scales and resolutions thus exceeding our processing capacity. We need tools that accelerate our understanding and generation of hypotheses over the datasets, guide our searches and prevent data overload. We describe XIM-engine, a bio-inspired software framework designed to capture and analyze multi-modal human behavior in an immersive environment. The framework allows performing studies that can advance our understanding on the use of conscious and unconscious reactions in interactive systems.