Explanations for autonomous vehicle (AV) decisions may build trust, however, explanations can contain errors. In a simulated driving study (n = 232), we tested how AV explanation errors, driving context characteristics (perceived harm and driving difficulty), and personal traits (prior trust and expertise) affected a passenger's comfort in relying on an AV, preference for control, confidence in the AV's ability, and explanation satisfaction. Errors negatively affected all outcomes. Surprisingly, despite identical driving, explanation errors reduced ratings of the AV's driving ability. Severity and potential harm amplified the negative impact of errors. Contextual harm and driving difficulty directly impacted outcome ratings and influenced the relationship between errors and outcomes. Prior trust and expertise were positively associated with outcome ratings. Results emphasize the need for accurate, contextually adaptive, and personalized AV explanations to foster trust, reliance, satisfaction, and confidence. We conclude with design, research, and deployment recommendations for trustworthy AV explanation systems.

To ensure safe passage blind travellers utilize mobility aids such as the white cane to preview the space their body will move through. Augmented white canes (AWC) have increased this preview range to reduce collisions, but consequently incurred lower walking speeds. The literature has blamed the slowdown on the AWC provided alerts that are additional to white cane feedback, unnecessary, too complex, and the anticipatory slowdown of their users. Two within-subject studies with six visually impaired and ten blindfolded people compared the white cane to two different AWC preview types (See Figure 1) combined with two ranges to investigate the causes of the slowdowns. The cognitive cost from processing AWC additional and unnecessary alerts and their complexity slowed users down and should be kept to a minimum as they neither helped reduce collisions nor physically detecting obstacles with the cane.

This essay has three parts. In Part 1, I review six biases that frame the way architects and human–computer interaction (HCI) practitioners think about their design problems. These arise from differences between working on procedurally complex tasks in peripersonal space like writing or sketching and being immersed in larger physical spaces where we dwell and engage in body-sized activity like sitting, chatting, and moving about. In Part 2, I explore three types of interface: classical HCI, network interfaces such as context-aware systems, and socio-ecological interfaces. An interface for an architect is a niche that includes the very people who interact with it. In HCI, people are still distinct from the interface. Because of this difference, architectural conceptions may be a fertile playground for HCI. The same holds for interactivity. In Part 3, I discuss why interactivity in HCI is symmetric and transitive. Only in ecological and social interaction is it also reflexive. In ecological interfaces, people co-create bubbles of joint awareness where they share highly situated values, experience, and knowledge.

The theory of embodied cognition can provide HCI practitioners and theorists with new ideas about interaction and new principles for better designs. I support this claim with four ideas about cognition: (1) interacting with tools changes the way we think and perceive -- tools, when manipulated, are soon absorbed into the body schema, and this absorption leads to fundamental changes in the way we perceive and conceive of our environments; (2) we think with our bodies not just with our brains; (3) we know more by doing than by seeing -- there are times when physically performing an activity is better than watching someone else perform the activity, even though our motor resonance system fires strongly during other person observation; (4) there are times when we literally think with things. These four ideas have major implications for interaction design, especially the design of tangible, physical, context aware, and telepresence systems.

BACKGROUND: There is growing interest in the use of technology to enhance the tracking and quality of clinical information available for patients in disaster settings. This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD). MATERIALS AND METHODS: WIISARD combined advanced networking technology with electronic triage tags that reported victims' position and recorded medical information, with wireless pulse-oximeters that monitored patient vital signs, and a wireless electronic medical record (EMR) for disaster care. The EMR system included WiFi handheld devices with barcode scanners (used by front-line responders) and computer tablets with role-tailored software (used by managers of the triage, treatment, transport and medical communications teams). An additional software system provided situational awareness for the incident commander. The WIISARD system was evaluated in a large-scale simulation exercise designed for training first responders. A randomized trial was overlaid on this exercise with 100 simulated victims, 50 in a control pathway (paper-based), and 50 in completely electronic WIISARD pathway. All patients in the electronic pathway were cared for within the WIISARD system without paper-based workarounds. RESULTS: WIISARD reduced the rate of the missing and/or duplicated patient identifiers (0% vs 47%, p<0.001). The total time of the field was nearly identical (38:20 vs 38:23, IQR 26:53-1:05:32 vs 18:55-57:22). CONCLUSION: Overall, the results of WIISARD show that wireless EMR systems for care of the victims of disasters would be complex to develop but potentially feasible to build and deploy, and likely to improve the quality of information available for the delivery of care during disasters.

The question of how to conceive and represent the context of work is explored from the theoretical perspective of distributed cognition. It is argued that to understand the office work context we need to go beyond tracking superficial physical attributes such as who or what is where and when and consider the state of digital resources, people's concepts, task state, social relations, and the local work culture, to name a few. In analyzing an office more deeply, three concepts are especially helpful: entry points, action landscapes, and coordinating mechanisms. An entry point is a structure or cue that represents an invitation to enter an information space or office task. An activity landscape is part mental construct and part physical; it is the space users interactively construct out of the resources they find when trying to accomplish a task. A coordinating mechanism is an artifact, such as a schedule or clock, or an environmental structure such as the layout of papers to be signed, which helps a user manage the complexity of his task. Using these three concepts we can abstract away from many of the surface attributes of work context and define the deep structure of a setting-the invariant structure that many office settings share. A long-term challenge for context-aware computing is to operationalize these analytic concepts.

We are quickly passing through the historical moment when people work in front of a single computer, dominated by a small CRT and focused on tasks involving only local information. Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructures of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction to advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task is no longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world of information and computer-mediated interactions. We think the theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies, for its focus has always been on whole environments: what we really do in them and how we coordinate our activity in them. Distributed cognition provides a radical reorientation of how to think about designing and supporting human-computer interaction. As a theory it is specifically tailored to understanding interactions among people and technologies. In this article we propose distributed cognition as a new foundation for human-computer interaction, sketch an integrated research framework, and use selections from our earlier work to suggest how this framework can provide new opportunities in the design of digital work materials.

Dramatic advances in 3D Web technologies have recently led to widespread development of virtual world Web browsers and 3D content.A natural question is whether 3D thumbnails can be used to find one's way about such 3D content the way that text and 2D thumbnail images are used to navigate 20 Web content We have conducted an empirical experiment that shows interactive 3D thumbnails, which we call worldlers, improve travelers' landmark knowledge and expedite wayfinding in virtual environments.

Virtual environment landmarks are essential in wayfinding: they anchor routes through a region and provide memorable destinations to return to later.Current virtual environment browsers provide user interface menus that characterize available travel destinations via landmark textual descriptions or thumbnail images.Such characterizations lack the depth cues and context needed to reliably recognize 3D landmarks.This paper introduces a new user interface affordance that captures a 3D representation of a virtual environment landmark into a 3D thumbnail, called a worldlet.Each worldlet is a miniature virtual world fragment that may be interactively viewed in 3D, enabling a traveler to gain first-person experience with a travel destination.In a pilot study conducted to compare textual, image, and worldlet landmark representations within a wayfinding task, worldlet use significantly reduced the overall travel time and distance traversed, virtually eliminating unnecessary backtracking.Landmarks are the subject of landmark knowledge, but also play a part in survey and procedural knowledge.In survey knowledge, landmarks provide regional anchors with which to calibrate distances and directions.In procedural knowledge, landmarks mark decision points along a route, helping in the recall of procedures to get to and from destinations of interest.Overall, landmarks help to structure an environment and provide directional cues to facilitate wayfinding. KEYWORDS: 3D thumbnails