Human Factors and Ergonomics Europe Chapter

With a little delay I would like to review the annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Europe Chapter, which occurred this year, October 24-26 in Braunschweig Germany. The conference was hosted by the DLR. It is Germany’s national research institute center for aeronautics, space and transportation. Therefore this human factor conference main theme was transportation, though other aspects of HMI (Human Machine Interfaces) were presented too.
The location was very nice and interesting. We had the chance to see and also experience some of the simulators that are used there for research.
First, the amazing driving simulator, which provides the driver with a 360 degrees point of view within the vehicle. It is mounted on a hydraulic platform which moves according to changes in the steering wheal and the speed. By far this was the most realistic driving experience I had and a simulator.

In addition we visited an air traffic control tower simulator. In this big room equipped with many computers and big screens, the DLR researchers examines new models for traffic control, interaction between the traffic controller and the pilot, remote traffic control for small air ports and more. They use real data from airports in Germany and in some experiments they communicate their own dedicated aircraft and pilot.

From a local point of view, Pnina Gershon was our (Israeli) representative. Her oral presentation “Using an Interactive Cognitive Task (ICT) for Maintaining Alertness During a Prolonged Drive” opened the conference and was very impressive. An interesting concept was presented by Ben Mulder , that is highly relevant to usability people. In his presentation “Using mouse-movements analysis for detecting strategies in complex task performance” he demonstrated a high correlation between results from eye-tracing system to mouse tracking data when interacting with a complex GUI. If any of you experienced in research using eye-tracking equipment you can appreciate the benefits of not having to use eye-tracking, the long calibration process, the amount of data and the complexity of the analysis. This fact emphasizes the importance of the click, or as Danny calls it “an indicator for a cognitive decision making process”. This reminds me the criticism I had on the interaction method explored in www.dontclick.it, which I might explain more in a next post.
There were many other interesting and relevant presentations, I will try to bring them up here in the future.