Towards an adaptive man-machine interface for virtual environments

We describe an approach to developing an adaptive virtual environment user interface to enable the user to perform a wide variety of tasks while immersed in the virtual environment. Currently, virtual environment operation places an unmanageable cognitive burden upon the user. While some advances in user interface design can alleviate some of this problem, the basic problem of information overload can not be adequately addressed solely through development of a better interface or provision of ad hoc decision support tools. We contend that a comprehensive design approach to the interface can improve user access to the virtual environment display parameters, analysis reports, conferencing and collaboration capabilities, intelligent agents for user assistance, motion and orientation controls, recording devices, and situation awareness aids. Our intelligent interface research effort, called Symbiotic Information Reasoning and Decision Support (SIRDS), addresses the issues related to the design and development of an adaptive, intelligent, learning man machine interface. Construction of the interface requires a mix of traditional human computer interaction, data visualization, and intelligent agents within a software engineering framework. The framework supports the symbiosis of human cognition and computational power that is required to deal with complex virtual environments.