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The increasing ubiquity and mobility of virtual reality (VR) devices has introduced novel use cases, one of which is using VR in vehicles, both human-driven and fully automated. However, the effects of the adoption of VR-in-the-car on user task performance, safety, trust, and perceived risk are still largely unknown or not fully understood. Blocking out the physical world and substituting it with a virtual environment has many potential benefits including fewer distractions and greater productivity. However, one shortcoming of this seclusion is losing situation awareness which becomes critical in dynamic, in-vehicle environments, even when the user is not in the driver's seat. Hence, this study aims to understand the effects of providing VR users with situation awareness cues about the real world, when riding in a human-driven or a fully automated car. The results of this driving simulator experiment provide valuable insights into passengers' experience and their information needs while immersed in VR environments. Identifying passengers' unique challenges and needs, as well as developing solutions for them, is expected to improve users' travel experience towards a wider adoption of VR devices.

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The auditory virtual reality interface of Audiom, a web-based map viewer, was evaluated by thirteen blind participants. In Audiom, the user is an avatar that navigates, using the arrow keys, through geographic data, as if they are playing a first-person, egocentric game. The research questions were: What will make blind users want to use Audiom maps? And Can participants demonstrate basic acquisition of spatial knowledge after viewing an auditory map? A dynamic choropleth map of state-level US COVID-19 data, and a detailed OpenStreetMap powered travel map, were evaluated. All participants agreed they wanted more maps of all kinds, in particular county-level COVID data, and they would use Audiom once some bugs were fixed and their few recommended features were added. Everyone wanted to see Audiom embedded in their existing travel and mapping applications. All participants were able to answer a question evaluating spatial knowledge. Participants also agreed this spatial information was not available in existing applications.

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Accessibility of assistive consumer devices is an emerging research area with potential to benefit both users with and without visual impairments. In this article, we discuss the research and evaluation of using a tactile button interface to control an iOS device's native VoiceOver Gesture navigations (Apple Accessibility, 2014). This research effort identified potential safety and accessibility issues for users trying to interact and control their touchscreen mobile iOS devices while traveling independently. Furthermore, this article discusses the participatory design process in creating a solution that aims to solve issues in utilizing a tactile button interface in a novel device. The overall goal of this study is to enable visually impaired white cane users to access their mobile iOS device's capabilities navigation aids more safely and efficiently on the go.

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Bone conduction headphones are devices that transmit sound through the bones of a listener's head rather than through the air in their outer ear. They have been marketed as a safer way to enjoy audio content while walking, jogging, or cycling. However, listening to distracting sounds over bone conduction may still disrupt a listener's awareness of their auditory environment. The present study investigated the nature of this interference with the faculty of sound source localization-a key prerequisite for generating situation awareness through audio. Participants sat in the middle of a circle of loudspeakers and listened for target sounds played from different directions. Each time they heard a sound, they responded by indicating what direction they judged the sound to have come from. Meanwhile, participants listened to distractor sounds played through bone conduction headphones. Participants heard (1) no distractor sounds, (2) a spoken story that they were instructed to ignore, and (3) the same spoken story that they were instructed to attend to. For conditions (2) and (3), some participants heard a version of the story with background music, while others heard the spoken story without the music. Participants had greater localization error in the distractor-present conditions. Additionally, participants who heard the spoken story with music exhibited greater localization error. However, there was no effect of whether participants ignored or attended to distractors. This pattern was attributed to masking effects, and was more pronounced for narrow-band targets compared to broadband targets. Post-hoc analyses found evidence of a 'pulling' effect, in which localization judgments were systematically biased toward the apparent direction of the bone conducted distractors. These results indicate that using bone conduction headphones can be expected to cause a decline in a person's awareness of their environment, in a subtle way that a jogger or cyclist might not be actively aware of, even if their attention is directed to the environment and environmental sounds are readily detectible.

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Research has suggested that interaction with an in-vehicle software agent can improve a driver's psychological state and increase road safety. The present study explored the possibility of using an in-vehicle software agent to mitigate effects of driver anger on driving behavior. After either anger or neutral mood induction, 60 undergraduates drove in a simulator with two types of agent intervention. Results showed that both speech-based agents not only enhance driver situation awareness and driving performance, but also reduce their anger level and perceived workload. Regression models show that a driver's anger influences driving performance measures, mediated by situation awareness. The practical implications include design guidelines for the design of social interaction with in-vehicle software agents.

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OBJECTIVE: The goal of this project is to evaluate a new auditory cue, which the authors call spearcons, in comparison to other auditory cues with the aim of improving auditory menu navigation. BACKGROUND: With the shrinking displays of mobile devices and increasing technology use by visually impaired users, it becomes important to improve usability of non-graphical user interface (GUI) interfaces such as auditory menus. Using nonspeech sounds called auditory icons (i.e., representative real sounds of objects or events) or earcons (i.e., brief musical melody patterns) has been proposed to enhance menu navigation. To compensate for the weaknesses of traditional nonspeech auditory cues, the authors developed spearcons by speeding up a spoken phrase, even to the point where it is no longer recognized as speech. METHOD: The authors conducted five empirical experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, they measured menu navigation efficiency and accuracy among cues. In Experiments 3 and 4, they evaluated learning rate of cues and speech itself. In Experiment 5, they assessed spearcon enhancements compared to plain TTS (text to speech: speak out written menu items) in a two-dimensional auditory menu. RESULTS: Spearcons outperformed traditional and newer hybrid auditory cues in navigation efficiency, accuracy, and learning rate. Moreover, spearcons showed comparable learnability as normal speech and led to better performance than speech-only auditory cues in two-dimensional menu navigation. CONCLUSION: These results show that spearcons can be more effective than previous auditory cues in menu-based interfaces. APPLICATION: Spearcons have broadened the taxonomy of nonspeech auditory cues. Users can benefit from the application of spearcons in real devices.

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A mental scanning paradigm was used to examine the representation of nonspeech sounds in working memory. Participants encoded sonifications - nonspeech auditory representations of quantitative data - as either verbal lists, visuospatial images, or auditory images. The number of tones and overall frequency changes in the sonifications were also manipulated to allow for different hypothesized patterns of reaction times across encoding strategies. Mental scanning times revealed different patterns of reaction times across encoding strategies, despite the fact that all internal representations were constructed from the same nonspeech sound stimuli. Scanning times for the verbal encoding strategy increased linearly as the number of items in the verbal representation increased. Scanning times for the visuospatial encoding strategy were generally slower and increased as the metric distance (derived metaphorically from frequency change) in the mental image increased. Scanning times for the auditory imagery strategy were faster and closest to the veridical durations of the original stimuli. Interestingly, the number of items traversed in scanning a representation significantly affected scanning times across all encoding strategies. Results suggested that nonspeech sounds can be flexibly represented, and that a universal per-item scanning cost persisted across encoding strategies. Implications for cognitive theory, the mental scanning paradigm, and practical applications are discussed.

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An ongoing research problem in Augmented Reality (AR) is to improve tracking and display technology in order to minimize registration errors. However, perfect registration is not always necessary for users to understand the intent of an augmentation. This paper describes the results of an experiment to evaluate the effects of registration error in a Lego block placement task and the effectiveness of graphical context at ameliorating these effects. Three types of registration error were compared: no error, fixed error and random error. These three errors were evaluated with no context present and some graphical context present. The results of this experiment indicated that adding graphical context to a scene in which some registration error is present can allow a person to effectively operate in such an environment, in this case completing the Lego block placement task with a reduced number of errors made and in a shorter amount of time.

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OBJECTIVE: We examined whether spatialized nonspeech beacons could guide navigation and how sound timbre, waypoint capture radius, and practice affect performance. BACKGROUND: Auditory displays may assist mobility and wayfinding for those with temporary or permanent visual impairment, but they remain understudied. Previous systems have used speech-based interfaces. METHOD: Participants (108 undergraduates) navigated three maps, guided by one of three beacons (pink noise, sonar ping, or 1000-Hz pure tone) spatialized by a virtual reality engine. Dependent measures were efficiency of time and path length. RESULTS: Overall navigation was very successful, with significant effects of practice and capture radius, and interactions with beacon sound. Overshooting and subsequent hunting for waypoints was exacerbated for small radius conditions. A human-scale capture radius (1.5 m) and sonar-like beacon yielded the optimal combination for safety and efficiency. CONCLUSION: The selection of beacon sound and capture radius depend on the specific application, including whether speed of travel or adherence to path are of primary concern. Extended use affects sound preferences and quickly leads to improvements in both speed and accuracy. APPLICATION: These findings should lead to improved wayfinding systems for the visually impaired as well as for first responders (e.g., firefighters) and soldiers.

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There is a critical need for navigation and orientation aids for the visually impaired. Developing such displays is difficult and time consuming due to the lack of design tools and guidelines, the inefficiency of trial-and-error design, and experimental participant safety concerns. We discuss using a virtual environment (VE) to help in the design, evaluation, and iterative refinement of an auditory navigation system. We address questions about the (real) interface that the VE version allows us to study. Examples include sound design, system behavior, and user interface design. Improved designs should result from a more systematic and scientific method of assistive technology development. We also point out some of the ongoing caveats that researchers in this field need to consider, especially relating to external validity and over-reliance on VE for design solutions.

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Sonifications must match listener expectancies about representing data with sound. Three experiments showed the utility of magnitude estimation for this. In Experiment 1, 67 undergraduates judged the sizes of visual stimuli and the temperature, pressure, velocity, size, or dollars they represented. Similarly, in Experiment 2, 132 listeners judged the pitch or tempo of sounds and the data they represented. In both experiments, polarity and scaling preference depended on the conceptual data dimension. In Experiment 3, 60 listeners matched auditory graphs to data created with the results of Experiment 2, providing initial validation of scaling slopes. Magnitude estimation is proposed as a design tool in the development of data sonifications, with the level of polarity preference agreement predicting mapping effectiveness.

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