CrashAlert: Enhancing Peripheral Alertness for Eyes-Busy Mobile Interaction while Walking

Abstract

Mobile device use while walking, or eyes-busy mobile interaction, is a leading cause of life-threatening pedestrian collisions. We introduce CrashAlert, a system that augments mobile devices with a depth camera, to provide distance and location visual cues of obstacles on the user’s path. In a realistic environment outside the lab, CrashAlert users improve their handling of potential collisions, dodging and slowing down for simple ones while lifting their head in more complex situations. Qualitative results outline the value of extending users’ peripheral alertness in eyesbusy mobile interaction through non-intrusive depth cues, as used in CrashAlert. We present the design features of our system and lessons learned from our evaluation.

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Slideshow

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Publisher Link

http://dx.doi.org.proxy2.lib.umanitoba.ca/10.1145/2470654.2466463

Citation

Hincapié-Ramos, J.D. and Irani, P. 2013. CrashAlert: Enhancing Peripheral Alertness for Eyes-Busy Mobile Interaction while Walking. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). Paris, France. ACM. 3385-3388

Bibtext Entry

@inproceedings{Hincapie-Ramos:2013:CEP:2466416.2466463,
author = {Hincapi{\'e}-Ramos, Juan David and Irani, Pourang},
title = {CrashAlert: enhancing peripheral alertness for eyes-busy mobile interaction while walking},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human factors in computing systems},
series = {CHI '13},
year = {2013},
location = {Paris, France},
pages = {3385--3388},
url = {http://doi.acm.org.proxy2.lib.umanitoba.ca/10.1145/2466416.2466463},
doi = {10.1145/2466416.2466463},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {eyes-busy interaction, obstacle avoidance, texting and walking, walking user interfaces},
}