A national study by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau revealed that motorcyclist deaths were nearly thirty times more prevalent than that of drivers of other vehicles. These fatalities represent approximately 5% of all highway deaths each year, yet motorcycles account for only 2% of all registered vehicles in the USA. Motorcyclists are highly exposed on the road, so maintaining situational awareness at all times is crucial. Route guidance systems enable users to efficiently navigate between locations using dynamic visual maps and audio directions, and have been well tested with motorists, but remain unsafe for use by motorcyclists. Audio/visual routing systems decrease motorcyclists' situational awareness and vehicle control, and thus elevate chances of an accident. To enable motorcyclists to take advantage of route guidance while maintaining situational awareness, we created HaptiMoto, a wearable haptic route guidance system. HaptiMoto uses tactile signals to encode the distance and direction of approaching turns, thus avoiding interference with audio/visual awareness. Our evaluations demonstrate that HaptiMoto is both intuitive and a safer alternative for motorcyclists compared to existing solutions.

Soldiers, to guard themselves from enemy assault, have to maintain visual and auditory awareness of their environment. Their visual and auditory senses are thus saturated. This makes these channels less usable for communication. The tactile medium of communication with users is appropriate for displaying information in such situations. Research in interpersonal communication among soldiers shows that the most common form of communication between soldiers involves the use of verb phrases. In this article, we have developed a three-by-three tactile display and proposed a method for mapping the components of a verb phrase to two dimensions of tactile codes—shape and waveform. Perception of tactile codes by users depends on the ability of users to distinguish shape and waveform of the code. We have proposed a measure to rate the distinguish-ability of any two shapes and created a graph-based user-centric model using this measure to select distinguishable shapes from a set of all presentable shapes. We conducted two user studies to evaluate the ability of users to perceive tactile information. The results from our first study showed users' ability to perceive tactile shapes, tactile waveforms, and form verb phrases from tactile codes. The recognition accuracy and time taken to distinguish were better when the shapes were selected from the graph model than when shapes were chosen based on intuition. The second user study was conducted to test the performance of users while performing a primary visual task simultaneously with a secondary audio or haptic task. Users were more familiar with perceiving information from an auditory medium than from a haptic medium, which was reflected in their performance. Thus the performance of users in the primary visual task was better while using an audio medium of communication than while using a haptic medium of communication.

When asked to draw, many people are hesitant because they consider themselves unable to draw well. This paper describes the first system for a computer to provide direction and feedback for assisting a user to draw a human face as accurately as possible from an image. Face recognition is first used to model the features of a human face in an image, which the user wishes to replicate. Novel sketch recognition algorithms were developed to use the information provided by the face recognition to evaluate the hand-drawn face. Two design iterations and user studies led to nine design principles for providing such instruction, presenting reference media, giving corrective feedback, and receiving actions from the user. The result is a proof-of-concept application that can guide a person through step-by-step instruction and generated feedback toward producing his/her own sketch of a human face in a reference image.