Abstract

International audience; Collaboration is key to safety and efficiency in Air Traffic Control. Legacy paper-based systems enable seamless and non-verbal collaboration, but trends in new software and hardware for ATC tend to separate controllers more and more, which hinders collaboration. This paper presents a new interactive system designed to support collaboration in ATC. We ran a series of interviews and workshops to identify collaborative situations in ATC. From this analysis, we derived a set of requirements to support collaboration: support mutual awareness, communication and coordination, dynamic task allocation and simultaneous use with more than two people. We designed a set of new interactive tools to fulfill the requirements, by using a multi-user tabletop surface, appropriate feedthrough, and reified and partially-accomplishable actions. Preliminary evaluation shows that feedthrough is important, users benefit from a number of tools to communicate and coordinate their actions, and the tabletop is actually usable by three people both in tightly coupled tasks and parallel, individual activities. At a higher level, we also found that co-location is not enough to generate mutual awareness if users are not engaged in meaningful collaboration.

Abstract

International audience; Developing for tabletops puts special requirements on interface programming frameworks: managing parallel input, device discovery, device equivalence, and describing combined interactions. We analyse these issues and describe the solutions that were used in IntuiKit, a model- based framework aimed at making the design and development of post-WIMP user interfaces more accessible. Some solutions are simple consequences of the support of multi- modality, while others are more specific to multiple touch. We illustrate these features through examples developed in several tabletop projects, including one application aimed at improving collaboration between air traffic controllers.