Colloquium Cognitive Systems

The Importance of Human-Computer Interaction Perspectives for Next‐Generation Spatial User Interfaces: Why Homer Simpson is right!

 

Prof. Dr. Johannes Schöning (University of St. Gallen)

 

Abstract:  Catastrophic incidents associated with GPS devices and other personal navigation technologies are all too common: A tourist drives his rental car across a beach and directly into the Atlantic Ocean, a person in Belgium intending to drive to a nearby train station ends up in Croatia, a family traveling on a dirt road gets stranded for four days in the Australian outback. Often we blame those accidents on human error. Still, as HCI researchers, we have a deep understanding that humans make mistakes, and it’s our responsibility to analyze the failures and improve the technical design to minimize the chances for human error. In my talk, I give an overview of how we design, develop and evaluate the next generation of such spatial user interfaces with a lens of human-computer interaction (HCI) and also highlight how past errors are integrated into next generation systems. I will outline our approaches to help people navigate, perceive and interact with space.

About: I am a professor of computer science at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, where I lead the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group. At the School of Computer Science, we offer an innovative modern computer science curriculum with Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation contents that are unique in Europe.