Although computers are an essential part of today's society,
communication between humans and computers is by far not as effective
as it could be. Particular problems are arising if this communication
has to take place under aggravated conditions, e.g., in a busy airport
environment. Today's information systems can give information about
the location of check-in terminals, restaurants or shops, but they
can't adapt at all to cognitive limitations of the passenger. This
can, for example, lead to situations where a delayed passenger under
time pressure is given very long and detailed directions which are
impossible to remember and follow correctly in the remaining time.
The REAL project is investigating some of the problems that can be
observed in these situations. In an airport scenario we try to find
out, how information systems can deal adequately with a passenger's
limited resources. Examples are the generation of directions or way
descriptions under time pressure, not only in verbal, but also in
graphical form. Graphical abstraction techniques are used to generate
visually clearer and simpler route sketches.
In addition to stationary information booths we are also considering
information presentation for mobile systems, such as PDAs or wearable
computers connected to head-worn displays. By focusing on these
device categories we are trying to develop techniques and solutions
for a technology that we believe will be almost ubiquitous in the near
future.
The design of our techniques is based on psychological experiments
about the limitation of human cognitive resources and our results are
verified by the implementation and field test of prototype systems.
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