Auditory display research for driving has mainly examined a limited range of tasks (e.g., collision warnings, cell phone tasks). In contrast, the goal of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of enhanced auditory menu cues in a simulated driving context. The advanced auditory cues of “spearcons” (compressed speech cues) and “spindex” (a speech-based index cue) were predicted to improve both menu navigation and driving. Two experiments used a dual task paradigm in which users selected songs on the vehicle’s infotainment system. In Experiment 1, 24 undergraduates played a simple, perceptual-motor ball-catching game (the primary task; a surrogate for driving), and navigated through an alphabetized list of 150 song titles—rendered as an auditory menu—as a secondary task. The menu was presented either in the typical visual-only manner, or enhanced with text-to-speech (TTS), or TTS plus one of three types of additional auditory cues. In Experiment 2, 34 undergraduates conducted the same secondary task while driving in a simulator. In both experiments, performance on both the primary task (success rate of the game or driving performance) and the secondary task (menu search time) was better with the auditory menus than with no sound. Perceived workload scores as well as user preferences favored the enhanced auditory cue types. These results show that adding audio, and enhanced auditory cues in particular, can allow a driver to operate the menus of in-vehicle technologies more efficiently while driving more safely. Results are discussed with multiple resources theory.

People now have access to many sources of data about their health and wellbeing. Yet, most people cannot wade through all of this data to answer basic questions about their long-term wellbeing: Do I gain weight when I have busy days? Do I walk more when I work in the city? Do I sleep better on nights after I work out? We built the Health Mashups system to identify connections that are significant over time between weight, sleep, step count, calendar data, location, weather, pain, food intake, and mood. These significant observations are displayed in a mobile application using natural language, for example, “You are happier on days when you sleep more.” We performed a pilot study, made improvements to the system, and then conducted a 90-day trial with 60 diverse participants, learning that interactions between wellbeing and context are highly individual and that our system supported an increased self-understanding that lead to focused behavior changes.

In this poster, we present the idea of “virtual transparency” for video see-through AR. In fully synthetic 3D graphics, head-tracked motion parallax has been shown to be a powerful depth cue for understanding the structure of the virtual world. To leverage head-tracked motion parallax in video see-through AR, the view of the virtual and physical world must change together in response to head motion. We present a system for accomplishing this, and discuss the benefits and limitations of our approach.

Auditory display research for driving has mainly focused on collision warning signals, and recent studies on auditory in-vehicle information presentation have examined only a limited range of tasks (e.g., cell phone operation tasks or verbal tasks such as reading digit strings). The present study used a dual task paradigm to evaluate a plausible scenario in which users navigated a song list. We applied enhanced auditory menu navigation cues, including spearcons (i.e., compressed speech) and a spindex (i.e., a speech index that used brief audio cues to communicate the user's position in a long menu list). Twenty-four undergraduates navigated through an alphabetized song list of 150 song titles---rendered as an auditory menu---while they concurrently played a simple, perceptual-motor, ball-catching game. The menu was presented with text-to-speech (TTS) alone, TTS plus one of three types of enhanced auditory cues, or no sound at all. Both performance of the primary task (success rate of the game) and the secondary task (menu search time) were better with the auditory menus than with no sound. Subjective workload scores (NASA TLX) and user preferences favored the enhanced auditory cue types. Results are discussed in terms of multiple resources theory and practical IVT design applications.