Exploring the use of mid-air ultrasonic feedback to enhance automotive user interfaces

Harrington, Kyle; Large, David R.; Burnett, Gary; Georgiou, Orestis

Abstract

© 2018 ACM. Employing a 2×2 within-subjects design, forty-eight experienced drivers (28 male, 20 female) undertook repeated button selection and 'slider-bar' manipulation tasks, to compare a traditional touchscreen with a virtual mid-air gesture interface in a driving simulator. Both interfaces were tested with and without haptic feedback generated using ultrasound. Results show that combining gestures with mid-air haptic feedback was particularly promising, reducing the number of long glances and mean off-road glance time associated with the in-vehicle tasks. For slider-bar tasks in particular, gestures-with-haptics was also associated with the shortest interaction times, highest number of correct responses and least 'overshoots', and was favoured by participants. In contrast, for button-selection tasks, the touchscreen was most popular, enabling the highest accuracy and quickest responses, particularly when combined with haptic feedback to guide interactions, although this also increased visual demand. The study shows clear potential for gestures with mid-air ultrasonic haptic feedback in the automotive domain.

Citation

Harrington, K., Large, D. R., Burnett, G., & Georgiou, O. (2018). Exploring the use of mid-air ultrasonic feedback to enhance automotive user interfaces. In AutomotiveUI '18: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications (11-20). https://doi.org/10.1145/3239060.3239089

• Conference Name: Proceedings - 10th International ACM Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, AutomotiveUI 2018
• Start Date: Sep 23, 2018
• End Date: Sep 25, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Sep 23, 2018
• Publication Date: Sep 23, 2018
• Deposit Date: Nov 22, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 27, 2018
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 11-20
• Book Title: AutomotiveUI '18: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications
• ISBN: 9781450359467
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3239060.3239089
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1221649
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3239060.3239089