Multimodal Interfaces for Situation Awareness and Attention in Automobiles
Susanne Boll
Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems
University of Oldenburg | OFFIS – Institut für Informatik
11 AM, July 1, 2015
Kingsbury W208 (ECE conference room)
Coffee and donuts will be served
Abstract
The number of assistance system in cars has been increasing of recent years. While these systems are targeted at a support of the individual driver and his or her safety, they may though compete for the driver’s attention and demand too much of the driver’s capacity. In recent years the use of different multimodal displays has been investigated in driver assistance systems for different kind of driving situation. In our recent work, we are investing peripheral light displays as a means for raising situation awareness and shifting attention in different driving situations.
Ambicar, our light display for peripheral presentation for time to collision in overtaking scenarios is used to indicate the distance to a closing vehicle. The light display is constructed as an LED stripe seamlessly integrated into the side door and dashboard of the car. We investigated different light patterns for encoding the expected time to collision to the rear car with the peripheral displays. In contrast to previous works, we did not focus on a warning system, but rather on a decision aid system. We found that using a pattern adaptive to a very simple model of driver’s certainty led to a smaller probability of violating safety distances and faster decisions. We will be further exploring peripheral light display as a promising way to contribute to situation awareness in different driving scenarios.
In the work on ResumptionCues we are addressing the challenge of handling multiple secondary tasks simultaneously like navigation and accepting a phone call. Our goal is to assist drivers by simplifying task resumption between secondary tasks. We employ the idea of priming the task before the task switch by multi-modal cues to support a later task resumption. We present multi-modal cues before an interrupting task to ”bookmark” the task context before switching to another tasks. When the interrupting task is over we use the same cue to support the resumption of the previous task. The results of simulator study showed that, comparing the performance in cued and non-cued conditions, users require less time to resume an interrupted task at the presence of cues and the number of errors made by users at resumption was also significantly reduced. Moreover, users acknowledged that the cues were helpful for recalling the deferred intention and agreed that they make task resumption easier.
Biography
Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll is Professor of Media Informatics and Multimedia Systems in the Department of Compu-ting Science at the University of Oldenburg, in Germany. She serves on the executive board of the OFFIS–Institute for Information Technology, in Oldenburg, where she heads many national and international re-search projects in the field intelligent user interfaces with an application in the automotive domain and per-sonal health. She also serves as the scientific head of the Human-Machine Interaction technology cluster at OFFIS. Prof. Dr. Boll earned a doctorate with distinction at the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. She received her diploma degree with distinction in computer science from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany in 1996, which is one of the nine leading technical universities (TU9) in Germany. Her diploma thesis was awarded the “Best Diploma Thesis 1996” prize of the German National Research Center for Information Technology GMD, an institute which later became part of Fraunhofer.
Her research interests lie in the field of semantic retrieval of digital media, mobile and pervasive systems, and intelligent user interfaces. During the last 10 years she has worked on user interfaces with different output modalities. Recently her research focus lies in the area of wearable and ambient light interfaces. Her work addresses societal challenges of our society such as save transportation, ageing society and personal health. Her scientific results have been published in competitive peer-reviewed international conferences, such as CHI, Pervasive, and MobileHCI, as well as internationally recognized journals. She has published more than 180 articles in competitive conferences, workshops, journals and books; served as a member on the technical program committees of more than 150 renowned conferences and workshops; and successfully acquired, led, and managed over 25 national and international projects.
As an active member of the scientific community she has been a reviewer for many international conference and journals. She has co-organized / co-chaired several scientific events in the field such as the Perva-siveHealth Conference 2014 in Oldenburg, Germany; Mensch und Computer (The German HCI Conference) 2013 in Bremen, Germany and the Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications Conf. (AutomotiveUI) 2010 in Pittsburgh, USA. She acts as an Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE Multimedia Mag-azine and associate editor of the Springer Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP). She is an active mem-ber of the ACM, IEEE and the German Computer Society (GI).