Decision support systems for time- and safety-critical
situations such as supervisory control, emergency service
dispatch, and air traffic control often utilise collaborative
"situation displays" that provide a shared visualization
of the problem domain. The display may be realistic, providing
a relatively faithful visual mapping of the actual problem
domain, or it may be quite abstract, representing information
about the problem domain through one or more transformations.
Increasingly, the power of computer graphics provides the
opportunity for 2-D and 3-D information displays of increasing
complexity, offering a choice of greater realism and also
greater abstraction. Our proposed research will investigate
a set of these options related to collaborative 2-D and
3-D displays used either by a group of people sharing a
single display, or by individuals who are co-ordinating
the information on their personal displays with a shared
display.
Our interdisciplinary approach examines perceptual
and cognitive processes, situated in higher-level tasks.
The applications are those in which the time to respond
and the appropriateness of the response are significant
factors, what we call "time-critical" and "safety-critical"
situations. Battlefield command and control systems are
the classic example, but many situations exhibit similar
requirements. Perhaps the best known of these is air traffic
control ("ATC"), where the need for quick and accurate decision
making by a team is a matter of public concern. These and
other applications share a few key attributes that are the
focus of our research: (a) an on-going dialogue among the
system and users mediated by a dynamic spatial display;
(b) the need to maintain awareness of changes in the display
over time in order to locate task objects on demand; and
(c) a desire to provide cues directing users.9 attention
to the display when key events take place.
