This paper describes our exploration of a design space for an augmented reality prototype. We began by observing air traffic controllers and their interactions with paper flight strips. We then worked with a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and controllers over a period of a year to brainstorm and prototype ideas for enhancing paper flight strips. We argue that augmented reality is more promising (and simpler to implement) than the current strategies that seek to replace flight strips with keyboard/monitor interfaces. We also argue that an exploration of the design space, with active participation from the controllers, is essential not only for designing particular artifacts, but also for understanding the strengths and limitations of augmented reality in general.

Air traffic control is a complex, safety-critical activity, with well-established and successful work practices. Yet many attempts to automate the existing system have failed because controllers remain attached to a key work artifact: the paper flight strip. This article describes a four-month intensive study of a team of Paris en route controllers in order to understand their use of paper flight strips. The article also describes a comparison study of eight different control rooms in France and the Netherlands. Our observations have convinced us that we do not know enough to simply get rid of paper strips, nor can we easily replace the physical interaction between controllers and paper strips. These observations highlight the benefits of strips, including qualities difficult to quantify and replicate in new computer systems. Current thinking offers two basic alternatives: maintaining the existing strips without computer support and bearing the financial cost of limiting the air traff...

Human-computer interaction is multidisciplinary, drawing paradigms and techniques from both the natural sciences and the design disciplines. HCI cannot be considered a pure natural science because it studies the interaction between people and artificially-created artifacts, rather than naturally-occurring phenomena, which violates several basic assumptions of natural science. Similarly, HCI cannot be considered a pure design discipline because it strives to independently verify design decisions and processes, and borrows many values from scientists. The purpose of this paper is to provide a simple framework that describes how the research and design models underlying HCI can be integrated. We explore the relationships among these approaches in the context of a particular research site, CENA, the Centre d' tudes de la Navigation Arienne, and illustrate how the various disciplines can contribute to a complex design problem: improving the interface to the French air traffic control syste...

Interest in pen-based user interfaces is growing rapidly. One potentially useful feature of pen-based user interfaces is gestures, that is, a mark or stroke that causes a command to execute. Unfortunately, it is difficult to design gestures that are easy 1) for computers to recognize and 2) for humans to learn and remember. To investigate these problems, we built a prototype tool for designing gesture sets. An experiment was then performed to gain insight into the gesture design process and to evaluate the tool. The experiment confirmed that gesture design is very difficult and suggested several ways in which current tools can be improved. The most important of these improvements is to make the tools more active and provide more guidance for designers. This paper describes the gesture design tool, the experiment, and its results. Keywords pen-based user interface, PDA, user study, gesture, UI design INTRODUCTION This work explores the process of gesture design with the goal of impr...

Critical parameters are quantitative measures of performance that may be used to determine the overall ability of a design to serve its purpose. Although critical parameters figure in almost every field of design where there is a demand for progressive improvement, they do not appear to figure significantly in the design of interactive systems. As a result, systems are designed that are recognizably different from other systems but not necessarily better at doing the job intended. This paper discusses the role of critical parameters in design, and illustrates their lack of use in interactive system design by presenting a number of of examples drawn from the HCI literature. It identifies a consequent need for research to establish critical parameters for applications and to build models of the performance of designs against these parameters. Some ideas are presented on how critical parameters might be established for specific applications, and the paper concludes by summarising some of the benefits that might be gained from moving in this direction.

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Emergency response requires strategic assessment of risks, decisions, and communications that are timecritical while requiring teams of individuals to have fast access to large volumes of complex information and technologies that enables tightly coordinated work. The access to this information by crisis management (CM) teams in emergency operations centers can be facilitated through various humancomputer interfaces. Unfortunately these interfaces are hard to use, require extensive training, and often impede rather than support teamwork. Dialogue-enabled devices, based on natural, multimodal interfaces have the potential of making a variety of information technology tools accessible during crisis management. This paper establishes the importance of multimodal interfaces in various aspects of crisis management and explores many issues in realizing successful speech-gesture driven, dialog-enabled interfaces for CM. The paper

We describe OctoPocus, an example of a dynamic guide that combines on-screen feedforward and feedback to help users learn, execute and remember gesture sets. OctoPocus can be applied to a wide range of single-stroke gestures and recognition algorithms and helps users progress smoothly from novice to expert performance. We provide an analysis of the design space and describe the results of two experiments that show that OctoPocus is significantly faster and improves learning of arbitrary gestures, compared to conventional Help menus. It can also be adapted to a markbased gesture set, significantly improving input time compared to a two-level, four-item Hierarchical Marking menu. ACM Classification: D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design

Gesture based interfaces promise to increase the efficiency of user input, particularly in mobile computing where standard input devices such as the mouse and keyboard are impractical. This paper describes an investigation into the low-level physical properties of linear `flick' gestures that users create using mouse and pen input devices. The study was motivated by our need to determine sensible constraints on values such as the magnitude, timing, and angular accuracy of gestures for a marking-menu implementation. The results show that pen gestures are substantially larger than mouse gestures, that angular errors are larger in the left and right directions with the pen, that vertical gestures are `awkward' with the mouse, and that downwards gestures are approximately 11% slower than other directions.

We present a classification of gesture-based computer interactions motivated by a literature review of over 40 years of gesture based interactions. This work presents a unique perspective on gesturebased interactions, categorized in terms of four key elements: gesture styles, the application domains they are applied to, input technologies and output technologies used for implementation. The classification provides a means of addressing gestures as an interaction mode across the different application domains so that researchers and designers can draw on the vast amount of research that has been addressed within the literature from an interaction perspective.