Attention Engineering and the Automobile
by
Charlie Bess
One of the predictions I had for 2008 was for fundamental changes in the user interface. This article describes efforts underway to provide a smarter automotive dashboard, addressing some of the attention engineering concerns I’ve discussed before.
A team from the Technical University of Berlin found that they could improve reaction times in real driving conditions by monitoring drivers' brains and reducing distractions during periods of high brain activity. They were able to speed up driver's reactions by as much as 100 milliseconds. It might not sound much, but this is enough to reduce breaking distance by nearly 3 meters when travelling at 100 kilometers per hour, says team leader Klaus-Robert Müller.
A paper describing the work was published in a book Toward Brain-Computer Interfacing late in 2007.
Having an automated environment with the ability to switch off extraneous information will be critical for organizations and individuals to take advantage of all the information flowing in from the edge of the enterprise and reduce latency in the decision making process. Even though I doubt the most organizations will monitor the executive’s brain as a tool to focus attention, there are still many context based ways to perform these functions, based on the context of the enterprise as well as the individual. As we place more sensors in the environment, the depth of contextual understanding will increase dramatically over the next few years.
