Recent technological advances have led to an increasing presence of multi-touch surfaces in daily consumer products. Still, many challenges remain when designing and evaluating dedicated multi-touch applications in safety and time critical domains. Our research goal was to investigate the value of multi-touch technology in the real work situation of military Air Traffic Control (ATC) with a user-centered approach. After gathering end-user's requirements via workshops, an existing ATC source application was adapted to be used on a multi-touch display. Finally, user evaluations were completed via observations and questionnaires. Findings suggested that multi-touch technology is suitable (satisfaction and effectiveness) for the ATC operational tasks, especially for graphical objects manipulation.
Web applications are currently widespread thanks to cloud computing and optimization of rendering/Javascript engines. Associating distant interaction devices could enhance user experience for such applications or allow them to become more pervasive. Our project MINY (Multimodality Is Nice For You) intends to provide a framework to develop multimodal Web applications. We have implemented a middleware that allows developers to easily program communication between Web application and distant interaction devices. We show on an example how we can associate dynamically interaction modalities at runtime thanks to reflexive properties of Javascript.
PlayAllAround is a wearable camera-pico-projector system where the scalable interface allows mobile interaction. We access the digital information from the projected scalable interface, which provides both the nearer small-size interface and the farther large-size interface supporting private and public use. The system is in charge of realizing our concepts of an environment independent interface (EII), which focuses on enabling people to access their personal data as well as public resources at any time and any place. In this paper, we propose the design of a reference-cell in the field of ergonomics as well as the principle from decomposition of the application tasks to allow a scalable interface design, with the aim of providing enhanced user experience. We also present the design and the implementation aspects of our PlayAllAround system. We finally describe the evaluation methods and results of the hover gesture and the scalable interface from both the qualitative and quantitative points of view.
This paper presents an approach to identify abnormal behavior in a sea surveillance context. It presents the equipment used by sea surveillance operators. Then, it details the cognitive process followed by operators to analyze a situation as well as the identification techniques that have been investigated to support sea surveillance. At last, the paper propose an original approach that includes the human operator during the detection process.
Sleep mode lets users go for days or weeks without rebooting, supporting work on multiple tasks that they can return to later. However, users also struggle with window clutter, facing an increasing number of `left-over windows' that get in the way. Our goal is to understand how users create and cope with left-over windows. We conducted a two-week field study with ten notebook users. We found that they work in very short sessions, switching often between computer-based and external tasks. 34% of left-over windows remain untouched for a day or more, increasing in quantitity until they all disappear after a reboot. Some users reboot as a deliberate `clean-up' strategy, whereas others lose left-over windows after an unexpected system crash. Users intentionally keep left-over windows as to-do lists, as reminders of upcoming tasks, and for facilitating future access; the rest are simply forgotten. Tools for visualizing and managing left-over windows should help users reduce window clutter, while maintaing the benefits of interruptible work sessions.
