Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the decision-making process. Improving the usability of GIS through these
aspects is important, since GIS are used in various critical contexts such as
emergency risk management (e.g. in case of natural disasters, terrorist
attacks, etc.).
In this article, we study how novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
techniques can improve GIS usability, especially for making command
selection easier and for enabling collaborative work. We propose an inter-
active setup (
Figure 1
) that enables co-located collaboration around an
interactive tabletop. Compared to personal computers, tabletops favor social
awareness, facilitate communication among users and make it possible for
several users to interact with the same data. Moreover, interactive table-
tops, and more especially multi-touch tabletops, provide a way of interact-
ing that is more natural and intuitive than traditional mouse and keyboard
interfaces. For instance, the "pinch" gesture, which has been popularized
by modern smartphones, allows users to zoom just by expanding two
fingers.
While interactive surfaces offer useful advantages for GIS, they also
involve some drawbacks. Intuitive gestures can only be used for a limited set
of commands (pan, zoom and rotate) while GIS software was designed to
provide lots of features. Classical graphical widgets such as menus or tool
palettes are not well adapted to interactive surfaces (Bailly et al. 2010) be-
cause of insufficient accuracy, occlusion by the user hand, the difficulty to
reach them (on large tables) and the lack of keyboard for entering text.
New interaction techniques are thus needed to exploit all the potentialities
of interactive tabletops for GIS applications.
We propose QGIS-MT, an extension of Quantum GIS (QGIS) for multi-
touch tabletops. QGIS-MT makes it possible to use QGIS on multi-touch
surfaces and favors collaboration. QGIS-MT also introduces a novel inter-
action technique, called Finger-Count Shortcuts, which allows users to
navigate and activate numerous commands quickly and easily by perform-
ing simple finger gestures. QGIS-MT hence improves the usability of
QGIS on interactive tabletops.
The article is organized as follows: first, existing collaborative setups used
in the context of GIS are presented, as well as the specifications of our in-
teractive and co-located setup. Then, there is a report of the results of an
interview with GIS users on their needs and the utility of our setup. Next
presented is a novel interaction technique that makes it possible to access
