FUSINC - Future User Interfaces for Control Centers

A 2013-2014 FV project supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology.

Intro- duction

Control rooms play an important role for the surveillance and manipulation of external processes in the industry or public infrastructure.

In this project we strive to develop innovative user interfaces for control centers with a special emphasis on the latest technologies for human-centered design processes. We will elaborate and implement concepts that incorporate the cognitive and physiological abilities of the user to enable a more intuitive and efficient Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI).

By considering the cognitive and physiological capabilities of the user we facilitate (a) a faster recognition of events, (b) a faster reaction towards events, (c) faster workflows, and (d) a better overview of the overall process. 


Illustration of the conceptualized control room.

In the design process we particularly apply the natural interaction paradigm as the main interaction principle. In the future the interaction will primarily be based on hand and finger movements, since they support the immediateness of the resulting HCI. Moreover, acoustical cues are directly incorporated into the interaction by offering a device-less communication and context-dependent audio feedback.

Demon- strator

We developed a demonstration arrangement with two fully equipped work stations to test the different interaction concepts. On the one hand to evaluate the interaction between the person and the system and on the other hand the interaction between several people. An automatic event generator provides realistic application data for various predefined scenarios. We can directly evaluate the new interaction concepts with subjects from the respective application area. Outcomes will provide valuable insights for both the general design process of interaction models and the developed special interaction paradigms.