Trail management is a complex, distributed endeavor that requires coordination among conservancies, government agencies, and local trail clubs to ensure visitor safety, environmental stewardship, and the protection of historical resources. Despite its importance, there has been limited systematic research on understanding or supporting the collaborative workflows that sustain this work. To help bridge this gap, we conducted interviews with 10 trail managers involved in or familiar with field operations across five major U.S. long-distance trails. A thematic analysis of the transcripts reveals that trail management spans a wide array of responsibilities, including volunteer coordination, resource allocation, hazard sense-making, and on-the-ground fieldwork. We identify institutional inefficiencies that surface during four distinct stages of the temporal collaborative sense-making process as managers interpret and act upon hiker-submitted reports of trail hazards. We conclude by outlining design implications for field reporting and decision-support systems that better align with the realities of volunteer-based, resource-constrained trail organizations, supporting more timely and coordinated action across distributed stakeholders.

In-vehicle infotainment systems can cause various distractions, increasing the risk of car accidents. To address this problem, mid-air gesture systems have been introduced. This study investigated the potential of a novel interface that integrates a Head-Up Display (HUD) with auditory displays (spearcons: compressed speech) in a gesture-based menu navigation system to minimize visual distraction and improve driving and secondary task performance. The experiment involved 24 participants who navigated through 12 menu items using mid-air gestures while driving on a simulated road under four conditions: HUD (with, without spearcons) and Head-Down Display (HDD) (with, without spearcons). Results showed that the HUD condition significantly outperformed the HDD condition in participants’ level 1 situation awareness, perceived workload, menu navigation performance, and system usability. However, there were trade-offs on visual fixation duration on the menu, and lane deviation. These findings will guide future research in developing safer and more effective HUD-supported in-vehicle gesture interaction systems.

Maintaining emotional connections and fostering meaningful communication among distant family members has long been challenging. Existing communication technologies, such as instant messaging, video-sharing, and social media enable quick exchanges but often lack mechanisms to initiate appropriate conversation topics and support in-depth emotional interactions. This study explores the use of digital diary-sharing in addressing these limitations. We conduct thematic analyses on diaries from a three-week study (N=22) using DailyBean, a diary app, to examine frequent patterns in users' sharing of outdoor experiences with distant family members. We identify five key mechanisms to support connections between distant family members: topic initiation, memory recall, shared moments, joint activities, and future planning. We also highlight frequent conversation topics that facilitate emotional engagement and reflection for distant family members. We conclude our study with design recommendations for effective diary-based family communication.

Using in-vehicle infotainment systems degrades driving performance and increases crash risk. To address this, we developed air gesture interfaces using various auditory displays. Thirty-two participants drove a simulator with air-gesture menu navigation tasks. A 4x2 mixed-model design was used to explore the effects of auditory displays as a within-subjects variable (earcons, auditory icons, spearcons, and no-sound) and menu-generation interfaces as a between-subjects variable (fixed and adaptive) on driving performance, secondary task performance, eye glance, and user experience. The adaptive condition centered the menu around the user’s hand position at the moment of activation, whereas the fixed condition located the menu always at the same position. Results demonstrated that spearcons provided the least visual distraction, least workload, best system usability and was favored by participants; and that fixed menu generation outperformed adaptive menu generation in driving safety and secondary task performance. Findings will inform design guidelines for in-vehicle air-gesture interaction systems.

In this paper results of a radio propagation measurement campaign at a centre frequency of 54 GHz and 70 GHz, with 6.0 GHz bandwidth are presented. An in-house built 2×2 MIMO chirp-based channel sounder with standard horn antennas configured to provide simultaneously co and cross-polarized information, was used in the measurements. The receiver antennas were rotated in 5° steps to provide full azimuth spatial angular information. In the paper the results of the estimated path loss, delay spread and azimuth angular spread statistics for a street canyon scenario is presented. Lower delay spread values are observed with the transmitter and receiver antennas facing each other. The mean azimuth angular spread is similar across the two bands for the same polarisation. The path loss coefficient on the co-polarized link was 2.4 and 2.0 for the 54 GHz and 70 GHz respectively.