Human Communication Based on Icons in Crisis Environments

In recent years, we have developed an icon-based communication interface to represent concepts and ideas. Users can create messages to communicate with others using a spatial arrangement of visual symbols. We deployed our icon-based interface in a serious game environment of a disaster and rescue simulator, which is capable of simulating real disaster situations using information from human user observers' reports. To support faster interaction, we designed a highly adaptive interface for optimizing the next icon look up. Inspired by the Fitaly keyboard, the system rearranges the icons menu's layout dynamically to minimize the searching time. Users are able to find their desired icons fast since the next icon selection is most likely to be one that is (on or) around the center. Our user tests showed that the developed icon-based interface could serve as a communication mediator. The experimental results also indicated that the Fitaly-based interface allowed for much faster and easier icon finding than the hierarchical menu.

[1]  Nl,et al.  Intelligent system for exploring dynamic crisis environments , 2006 .

[2]  Aravind K. Joshi,et al.  Tree Adjunct Grammars , 1975, J. Comput. Syst. Sci..

[3]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Designing the user interface (2nd ed.): strategies for effective human-computer interaction , 1992 .

[4]  Charles J. Fillmore,et al.  THE CASE FOR CASE. , 1967 .

[5]  Shumin Zhai,et al.  The metropolis keyboard - an exploration of quantitative techniques for virtual keyboard design , 2000, UIST '00.

[6]  Samit Bhattacharya,et al.  Vernacular Education and Communication Tool for the People with Multiple Disabilities , 2002 .

[7]  Ute J. Dymon,et al.  An analysis of emergency map symbology , 2003 .

[8]  Colin Beardon,et al.  CD-Icon: an iconic language based on conceptual dependencyBrighton , 1992, Intell. Tutoring Media.

[9]  Paul Honeywill.  Review of: The Elephants Memory , 1996, Intell. Tutoring Media.

[10]  Masoud Yazdani,et al.  Communicating through pictures , 1995, Artificial Intelligence Review.

[11]  Pauline A. Smith.  Towards a Practical Measure of Hypertext Usability , 1996, Interact. Comput..

[12]  J. Kamps,et al.  Words with attitude , 2002 .

[13]  Sergio Orefice,et al.  A methodology and interactive environment for iconic language design , 1994, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[14]  Christiane Fellbaum,et al.  Book Reviews: WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database , 1999, CL.

[15]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction , 1998 .

[16]  Léon J. M. Rothkrantz,et al.  Constructing Knowledge of the World in Crisis Situations using Visual Language , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[17]  L. J. M. Rothkrantz,et al.  An Icon-Based Communication Tool on a PDA * , 2004 .

[18]  I. Scott MacKenzie,et al.  Text Entry for Mobile Computing: Models and Methods,Theory and Practice , 2002, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[19]  L. I. Perlovsky.  Emotions, learning and control , 1999, Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control Intelligent Systems and Semiotics (Cat. No.99CH37014).

[20]  I. Scott MacKenzie,et al.  The design and evaluation of a high-performance soft keyboard , 1999, CHI '99.

[21]  Alan F. Blackwell,et al.  Dasher—a data entry interface using continuous gestures and language models , 2000, UIST '00.

[22]  Julia Hirschberg,et al.  Error handling in spoken dialogue systems , 2005, Speech Commun..

[23]  Martha Palmer,et al.  Verbnet: a broad-coverage, comprehensive verb lexicon , 2005 .

[24]  Lee A. Becker,et al.  Vil: a visual inter lingua , 2001 .