Situation Awareness

Inf@Vis! has an article on Situation Awareness by Juan C. Dürsteler a fellow researcher at the Technology Department at UPF.

Situation awareness is what’s needed in many environments in order to operate safely avoiding the appearance of critical situations. When they appear it’s still more important to know instantly the relevant information regarding the crisis.

Situation awareness can be very relevant to ubiquitous environment and showing the causes of uncertainty only when necessary instead of clogging the user’s cognitive system.

Juan talks about a recent Air Transat flight during which the plane flamed out both jets due to a complete loss of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean. The pilots were unable to correctly identify the loss of fuel that happened in one of the turbines. They thought for a long time the oil temperature readings and remaining fuel were wrong due to the unusual situation and the causes that led to it.

This is a clear example of the importance of situation awareness. The information systems in the plane were accurately reporting the situation but with huge amount of detailed information. This goes against Ben Schneiderman’s mantra: “Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand”.

Multifunction displays considerably reduce the cognitive overload and enable the user to see on the screens the most relevant set of information for the flight while the rest of it stays in the background, except when an alarm occurs. This way the pilots provide themselves with a situation awareness that instead of clogging their cognitive system, frees it from the overload other systems impose.

Wireless Connectivity in Mass Transit System

While reading Underground, but not unconnected — BART offers wireless service to riders I found funny that the reasons to get wireless connectivity in transit systems are:

• (My food) phone in a pizza order on their way home.
• (My safety)What if there was a disaster? It’s a safety issue
• (My work) “I wish it could work everywhere I go,” he said. “Even underwater, swimming. “

Cons are:

• (Social) No more ‘I’m sorry, I can’t talk, I’m on BART,’ ‘
• (Social) Worry about loudmouthed louts shouting into their cell phones to be heard over the train noise.

Or the future of wireless in mass transit systems is this?:

“I’d like to see cellular availability every place,” she said. “Would I use it? I don’t think I’ve used my cell phone on BART ever.”

Somehow it is like the beach in the Bay Area… it is nice that it is there, but you rarely enjoy it.

Augmented Maps

Augmented maps, which add digital graphical information and user interface components to printed maps.

Localisation and Interaction for Augmented Maps by Gerhard Reitmayr, Ethan Eade and Tom Drummond explains an experiment based on augmented maps. In the simulation areas of flooding are superimposed onto a map of Cambridge along with live images captured by a camera in the city’s centre. An operator can see the image and assess the local situation immediately. An emergency unit represented as a helicopter is visible on the map as well. Now, the researchers want to move out from their labs and build a deployable and mobile system.

A short video showing localisation of maps and the use of the different tools.

Understanding Spatial Abilities

I developed mobile applications that use maps to render positioning information. However map literacy isn’t necessarily a given. Reading them might ask an effort and can even be misleading. I had players reporting me that they got lost on the map with their position while being familiar with the physical environment.

Why Some Students Have Trouble with Maps and Spatial Representations is a tutorial for college-level geoscience instructors that looks at spatial abilities (i.e. the capacity to extrapolate the real world from maps, models and the like).

Via The Map Room

4th Place and Mobile Technologies

Finally a survey that links the 4th place with mobile technologies. It is a clear confirmation of mobile usage in this particular context and maybe a need to define scenarios.

“A significant number of Americans use the computer connection in the bathroom”

Le Continuum Numérique en Suisse

Luc Vodoz, politologue, chercheur à la CEAT (institution intercantonale et interuniversitaire romande rattachée à l’EPFL) à propos du rapport rédigé dans le cadre du Programme national de recherche “Intégration et exclusion”: Ordinateur et précarité au quotidien: les logiques d’intégration provisoire de la formation continue. Voici un entretien sur son analyse des TIC en Suisse. Il mentionne que:

• Parler de fracture est une abus de language pour pouvoir créer des catégories. La situation en Suisse est plus une continuum numérique.
• Il n’y a pas de vrai fracture, mais l’intégration n’est jamais parfaite pour personne, parce que les TIC exigent des capacités d’apprentissage continu. Il y a un large sentiment permanent d’insécurité parce qu’il y a besoin d’efforts d’adaptation permanants.
• Les 3/4 des élèves suisses qui terminent leur scolarité ne vont pas surfer sur le web. Ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’ils n’utilisent pas d’autres technologies numériques (jeux, mobile, IM, …). Mais ils n’utilisent pas ces technologies dans une perpsective plus productive (par exemple pour trouver un travail).
• La plupart du temps, les technologies ne sont pas là pour créer des liens sociaux, mais entretenir des liens sociaux
• Perception réelle de la population sur les TIC est que la société de l’information c’est la télévision, beaucoup d’information, beaucoup de publicité dans mon boîte aux lettres. Tout cela est très loin des discours de la révolution de la société de l’information, que le monde a changé et que tout doit être adapté en conséquences. La population n’a donc pas perception d’un nouveau paradigme du fonctionnement de la société.

Technologies Pervasives et le Désordre

Edito complètement décousu mais très dense et riche de Daniel Kaplan dans Internet Actu. Le titre
Désordinateurs II : “Les mots de la tribu” n’est qu’un avant-goût. Il parle de la fusion du virtuel et du réel, de la nature et de l’artificiel, et que la connexion et l’artificiel deviennent les états par défaut. Les technologies ne sont pas source d’ordre et maîtrise, mais sont des agents du désordre et du bruit (dans le sens surplux d’informations, de données, d’idées, …). Ce vacarme quotidien à pour effet que l’on ne peut pas penser l’avenir avec des grands desseins, des intentions clairement formulées, des stratégies d’empires, et proche de la vitalité du social.

Je garde une phrase proche de mes questions de recherche (perception des environnements omniprésents et gestion de leur complixité au niveau de l’utilisateur).

Nous devons apprendre à observer les technologies “pervasives (omniprésentes) et invasives d’aujourd’hui sous cet angle, celui du désordre plutôt que de l’ordre, du désir plutôt que de l’efficacité, du quotidien plutôt que du grand dessein.

Mobile Technologies are Shields That Protect us From the World

In current issue of Vodafone’s receiver Erik Holmquist (the leader of the Future Applications Lab at the Viktoria Institute in Göteborg) describes his lab’s researches in mobile media and ubiquitous displays. Erik’s interests match mine: HCI, InfoViz and Ubicomp. Nothing really new under the sun in his presentation of their work on mobile collaborative games context photography. I in fact really like his mention against the current frenzy to create interaction from scratch:

“Often, we use mobile technology to create a shield that protects us from the world.”

Mobile technologies offer bridges and shields… and all our efforts tend to multiple the bridges and destroy the shields. Of course bridges are more romantic than walls… but is it really what we want?

Unubiquitous Mode

Via P&V, Marko Ahtisaari is the Director of Design Strategy at Nokia gave an interview to the Danish Design Centre. The main lines I take from this interview are that Nokia works on:

• “elegant” simplicity to hide the ever-growing complexity of hybrid product that mobile devices are now becoming. It is a major design challenge
• Bringing the sense of off and online. There is a need to retreat from the “always connected” mode. Designing a sometimes-off experience for an always-on world. How we tune out, and then tune back in?

I find funny that there we certainly be a need of an “unubiquitous mode” in the ubiquitous environments we are trying to create.

The Uses of a Geo-localized Mobile Game in Japan

“Seing” one another onscreen and the construction of social order in mobile-based augmented public space by Christian Licoppe and Yoriko Inada, Learning in the Mobile Age Conference (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, April 28–30, 2005).

In this paper (that follows this one) the authors present a case study about the use of Mogi-Mogi, a geo-localized mobile game in Japan. They analize how “seing” one another onscreen and geographical closeness it entails become a pretext to start text-messaging exchanges and face-to-face meeting.

Mogi-Mogi is indeed the first advanced, somehow popular (around 1000 users) geo-localized game that could provide a glimpse of what the experience of living in a mobile-based augmented urban public space might be like. It is a great example on how context-sensitive mobile service closely binds technical protocols to social ones, especially those governing interactions in the public sphere.

Confirming mutual proximity
Onscreen encounters make the mobile screen a new type of public space, one of mutual visibility and mediated co-presence, accessible to all players. It was observed the first turn of text-message interaction is an invitation to confirm the mutual proximity:

The opening of the interaction by an adjacent pair oriented towards enunciation and confirmation of the participants’ mutual proximity is a conventional mechanism of openness characteristics of interactions in the geo-localized public space of Mogi.

Publicizing spatial position
The analysis shows that players reflexively oriented themselves towards publicizing their spatial position in order to develop specific formats of conversational openness. They cooporerated to align or desalign incorporated “situation” and screen “situations”.

Polite inattention
I enjoy the definition of “polite inattention”: strangers acknowledging each other presence without engaging into an interaction.

Uncertainty
On the side, this papers mentions a couple the technological pitfalls that influence the experience:

• The rapidity of these connections with the game server is critical as regards to the acceptability of the game. At certain times the connection time ranged from 30 seconds to one minute, which was experience as a real problem by players
• In explaining the “invitation to confirm the mutual proximity”, the authors mention “It can be mobilized again during use of the device in the form of a background of shared expectations concerning the more or less robust way in which the screen representations relate to a real location and can simultaneously be visible to other connected players”