Industry: Safety-Critical HCI

Timeline: Set 2022 - Jan 2023 (5 months)

Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer

Team Size: Single Project

Overview

VIGIL is an augmented reality helmet interface designed to assist urban firefighters during emergency operations. Developed as part of a master's-level academic project, it explores how multimodal interactions and real-time feedback can enhance decision-making in high-stress environments.

Challenge

Firefighters operate in safety-critical situations where visibility is low, hands are occupied, and communication is vital. The challenge was to design an interface that delivers relevant information while minimizing cognitive load, without distracting from the core task of intervention.

Understanding Firefighter Needs Through Research

Extensive research included exploratory interviews with Portuguese firefighters, literature review on cognitive load and safety-critical HCI, and benchmarking of existing AR helmets. Insights highlighted the need for intuitive, mostly hands-free interactions and better team coordination tools.

Firefighter command post near Lisbon where the interviews were ran.

Feature set based on the user research setting the scope for which features should be implemented and how they should be organized

1. FIrst sketches of the AR interface
2. FOV Studies for information priorization
3. Wireframe structuring the information visualization

Designing an AR Interface for Safety-Critical Tasks

From those insights, I developed an interaction model and a mitigation framework based on user urgency states, triggered by biometric and environmental inputs. A Field-of-View study was also done to better comprehend the space we had to display information visually.

Balancing Context with Clarity

This project was a valuable opportunity to explore how people interact with context-sensitive interfaces, i.e., systems that respond not just to user input, but also to environmental conditions.

I focused on designing an experience where the right information appears at the right moment. Prototyping these ideas posed a challenge due to the speculative nature of the hardware, requiring creative workarounds to simulate the intended interactions.

Adaptive UI with Mitigation Framework Prototype

The final deliverables included wireframes, UX animations, and a full UI library and language. Key interaction flows such as login, team tracking, and biometric alerts were designed to reduce friction and improve safety during high-pressure scenarios and visualized through small videos.

This is one of the different short videos that display how the interface react to situations based on its sensors

Gameplay of the Unity experience I designed and developed that demonstrated some of the capabilities of the interface

Interactive Game Prototype to Simulate Experience

The interactive prototype successfully showcased how the helmet interface could adapt to critical contexts. The mitigation framework stands out as a scalable approach to designing real-time adaptive interfaces for safety-critical environments.

VIRGIL AR Helmet UI Concept

Augmented-Reality for Safety-Critical HCI