Passive and active navigation of virtual environments vs. traditional printed evacuation maps: A comparative evaluation in the aviation domain

Printed maps are the most common tool to prepare people for emergency evacuation in contexts such as public buildings or transportation. Unfortunately, they are poorly understood and often ignored by people. Virtual environments (VEs) could be a more effective method to support people in acquiring spatial knowledge about the real-world environment to evacuate. This paper pursues three main goals. First, we propose a VE-based tool to support spatial knowledge acquisition for evacuation purposes, using aviation as a real-world domain in which such knowledge is crucial for passengers' safety. Second, we study in detail one of the VE design choices (active or passive navigation), comparing a version of our tool in which users navigate by actively controlling their position with another version in which users are passively led along pre-defined routes. Third, we contrast the two versions of the tool with the traditional, printed diagrammatic map provided to passengers by airlines. Results of our study show that the VE-based approach produces objectively better spatial knowledge when users are asked to pinpoint their assigned position in the environment, and that active navigation produces a performance improvement in a subsequent virtual evacuation. Moreover, the VE-based approach is perceived as more enjoyable, easier to comprehend and more effective than printed maps when active navigation is available

Automatic camera control meets emergency simulations: An application to aviation safety

Computer-based simulations of emergencies increasingly adopt 3D graphics to visualize results and thus generate complex dynamic 3D scenes with many potentially parallel events that a\u21b5ect large groups of virtual characters. To understand the portrayed scenario, a viewer could interactively control a flying camera or switch among a set of virtual cameras that have been previously placed at modeling time. The first solution imposes a cognitive load on the viewer that can distract him/her from the analysis task, and (s)he might miss events while moving the camera. The second solution requires additional work in the modeling phase, and even a very large number of cameras could fail to correctly frame events because of dynamic occlusions. More sophisticated automatic camera control methods could help, but the methods in the literature are designed for sequential dialogue-like events that involve at most two or three characters and therefore would not work. In this paper, we present a fully automated, real-time system that is able to monitor events in emergency simulations, select relevant events based on user-provided filtering rules, and control a virtual camera such that the events of interest are properly presented to the viewer. To illustrate how the system works in practice, we also describe the first application of automatic camera control to the domain of aviation safety

A P300 auditory brain-computer interface based on mental repetition

Objective. The current study evaluates an auditory brain-computer interface (BCI) protocol that allows users to mentally choose among 6 options. Methods. The protocol is based on an oddball P300 paradigm. To reduce mental workload, we introduce a change in the typical oddball paradigm task: instead of passively counting the presented target auditory stimuli, we ask participants to simply mentally repeat them when they occur. In the study, ten healthy participants carried out two calibration sessions respectively with traditional mental count and with the proposed mental repetition and then three free item selection sessions using mental repetition. A comparison has been conducted between off-line count and mental repetition classification accuracies achieved by each participant during the calibration sessions. The mental workload difference between the count and repeat calibration sessions of each participant was evaluated by computing alpha (at Po8) and theta (at Fz) spectral power density (SPD) curves. Results. Nine out of ten participants showed a higher mental workload with the traditional mental count. The repeat activity was preferred by 8 out of 10 participants. The comparison conducted between off-line count and mental repetition classification accuracies shows a slightly worse average behavior for the repeat protocol in the first 8 averaged trials. With the proposed protocol we got an average on-line item-selection information transfer rate (ITR) over 2 trials of 2.35 bits min−1, and an average on-line accuracy over 10 trials of 81.7%. Conclusions. Although off-line classification based on mental count data got slightly better results, the proposed auditory BCI protocol with mental repetition achieved an on-line performance similar to the traditional counting oddball paradigm task but with a lower mental workload. Significance. The results obtained with healthy subjects suggest that the proposed protocol can be a simpler alternative to the mental count, with comparable performance and lower mental load

Tailoring web pages for persuasion on prevention topics: Message framing, color priming, and gender

On the Web, as in more traditional influence contexts, the most effective persuasive strategies often depend on the individual characteristics of the message recipient. Unfortunately, most persuasive technology applications currently employ a one-size-fits-all approach to interventions. The study we illustrate investigates two different techniques (message framing and color priming) that can be used in tailoring a persuasive Web page about a prevention topic. The findings of our study highlight interactive effects between message framing and color priming, and advance the results in the literature by showing that red enhances the effects of framing in a gender-based fashion. The obtained results also provide practical guidance for automatic tailoring of persuasive Web pages about prevention topics, suggesting a strategy based on gender, an information about the user that is typically readily available in social network profiles, and other Web sites to which people register

A comparative study of aviation safety briefing media: card, video, and video with interactive controls

Passengers\u2019 safety knowledge is a key factor in determining the chance of surviving any life- or injury-threatening situation that could occur in civil aviation. Aviation regulations require airlines to provide safety briefings to inform passengers of safety procedures on board. The safety briefing card and the safety briefing video are the two media that airlines routinely employ on board to this purpose. Unfortunately, research on aviation safety briefing media has cast serious doubts about their efficacy, urging researchers to better understand what makes safety briefing media effective as well as improving their effectiveness. This paper contributes to such goals in two different ways. First, it proposes the introduction of interactive technology into aviation safety briefings for improving their effectiveness. Second, it illustrates a controlled study that compares the effectiveness of three safety briefing media: the two briefing media that airlines currently employ on-board (safety briefing card and safety briefing video) and a safety briefing video extended with basic interactive controls. The results obtained by the study highlight a superior effectiveness of the two video media over the card media for aviation safety briefings. Moreover, the video with interactive controls produced improvements over the card in a larger number of effectiveness measures than the traditional video. The paper includes a discussion of factors that can explain the better results obtained with the video conditions, and in particular the video with interactive controls, and of possible additional extensions to increase the interactivity of aviation safety briefings. \ua9 2017 Elsevier Lt

Information Visualization And its Application to Medicine

This paper provides an introduction to the field of Information Visualization (IV) and a discussion of its application to medical systems. More specifically, it aims at: (i) defining what IV is and what are its goals, (ii) highlighting the similarities and differences between IV and traditional medical imaging, (iii) illustrating the potential of IV for medical applications by examining several examples of implemented systems, (iv) giving some general indications about the purposes and the effective exploitation of an IV component into a medical system