calculating water pipelines a simply drawing of the intended
connection with immediate feedback replaces a manual process
that required 30min with paper maps and required significant
experience to avoid calculation errors).
5.3 Interface improvement
The user feedback also led to a number of interesting insights
into multi-touch gestures for rotation and translation. While
these are well established on single user devices like tablets and
smartphones they are not applicable in a mission critical multi-
user application. This is due to the potential for un-intended and
non-comprehensible transformations and the need for traceable
actions. For other interactions multi-touch gestures were found
suitable. The experience with digital pens and tangible indicates
that they enable very natural interactions in our application
context with correspondingly high acceptance by users.
6. CONCLUSION
Research is required to exploit the potential of advanced
visualization techniques and user interaction techniques in
disaster management and similar applications. The step from
technology demonstrators to usable real-world systems requires
adequate tools and stable base-technologies and the evaluation
and validation of different design options in a real-world
application context.
A promising extension of the system would be to extend the
support of not just the planning staff in the comand center, but
also to individual rescue workers in the field. In a separate
project (FireNet) we have conducted early experiments with a
mobile personal sensor network. Integrating such functionality
within the disaster management application could further
improve situation awareness in the command center by allowing
real-time tracking of rescue personal as well as equipment
position and state. Another area for future work concerns the
extension from the current focus on observation (situation
awareness) to analysis and prediction. The digital data enables
the use of analysis functions (as exemplified by the pump
planning) and a future extension towards simulation/prediction
could be useful, especially in dynamic natural disaster situations
like flooding or fires.
6.1 Implications
Novel interaction and visualization platforms like multi-touch
tables are rapidly becoming commodity items. The design of
user interfaces for these devices requires the consideration of
the application context and user requirements. Neither, the
experiences from desktop based interfaces based on the WIMP
(windows, icons, menus, pointers) nor from small multi-touch
devices like tablets and smartphones, that are designed for
individual use, can be directly applied to the development of
multi-modal multi-user interfaces.
The experience with THW rescue workers in a real-world
application scenario has demonstrated that the key benefit of
such new interaction and visualization techniques lies not so
much in the fact that a single conventional technique can be
replaced by a “better” one, but that the new techniques enable
the creation of interactive work environments that were not
possible with conventional techniques, in turn enabling
significant process improvements that provide a real benefit to
the end-users.
In future work it will be essential to study the cognitive
workload of users and examine the potential physiological
60
dangers that may be incurred by prolonged use of large-scale
post-WIMP displays. While the ergonomic requirements of
desktop workplaces are well understood the same is not true for
new interaction environments. Established ergonomic standards
were often ignored in early demonstrators because of
technology constraints (e.g. lighting levels to reduce IR
contamination). And while interaction techniques like free-hand
gestures are intuitive they can also cause a high-level of fatigue.
Thus, many central research questions pertaining to the use of
post-WIMP interfaces in geo-information exist, that will have to
be addressed to effectively exploit the possibilities of this new
interaction styles.
7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank the German Federal Agency for
Technical Relief (Technisches Hilfswerk/THW) in Detmold for
the productive collaboration, specifically Thorsten Meier and
Oliver Charles as well as the students in our students project
groups at the University of Paderborn.
8. REFERENCES
ANOTO webpage: http://www.anoto.com. Last accessed
15.4.2012.
GestDisplay, 2012: Webpage: http://www.gesturetek.com/
illuminate/productsolutions 70-multi-touch.php. Last accessed
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Haller, M., Brandl, P., Leitner, J., Seifried, T.: Large interactive
surfaces based on digital pens. In: 10th Interantional
Conference on Humans and Computers, pp. 172-177 (2007)
Inspire Directive (Directive 2007/2/EC of the European
Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007):
http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ Last accessed 15.4.2012.
Ishii, H. 2008: The tangible user interface and its evolution
Communications of the ACM , June 2008, Volume 51, Issue 6.
>
Jacob, R et al. 2008. Reality-based interaction: a framework for
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Jung, H; Nebe, K.; Klompmaker, F.; Fischer, H.:
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Kobayashi, K., Kakizaki, T., Narita, A., Hirano, M., Kase, I.
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Nebe, K., Klompmaker, F., Jung, H. and Fischer, H. 2011.
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PrimeToch, 2012: webpage: http://www.prime-touch.com/;
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van Oosterom, P.; Zlatanova, S.; Fendel, E. (Eds.) Geo-
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