Fabius Steinberger

Vote With Your Feet: Local Community Polling on Urban Screens

Falling prices have led to an ongoing spread of public displays in urban areas. Still, they mostly show passive content such as commercials and digital signage. At the same time, technological advances have enabled the creation of interactive displays potentially increasing their attractiveness for the audience, e.g. through providing a platform for civic discourse. This poses considerable challenges, since displays need to communicate the opportunity to engage, motivate the audience to do so, and be easy to use. In this paper we present Vote With Your Feet, a hyperlocal public polling tool for urban screens allowing users to express their opinions. Similar to vox populi interviews on TV or polls on news websites, the tool is meant to reflect the mindset of the community on topics such as current affairs, cultural identity and local matters. It is novel in that it focuses on a situated civic discourse and provides a tangible user interface, tackling the mentioned challenges. It shows one Yes/No question at a time and enables users to vote by stepping on one of two tangible buttons on the ground. This user interface was introduced to attract peoples attention and to lower participation barriers. Our field study showed that Vote With Your Feet is perceived as inviting and that it can spark discussions among co-located people.

The antecedents, experience, and coping strategies of driver boredom in young adult males

INTRODUCTION Road crash statistics are evidence of the severe consequences resulting from human error, especially among young adult males. Drivers perform best and safest when they are adequately engaged in the driving task. Boredom and a lack of engagement in the driving task may cause risk taking and phone use. However, the antecedents to driver boredom, the subjective experience itself, as well as the coping strategies to combat boredom are not well understood. The aim of this study was to investigate these aspects. METHOD We carried out a qualitative study in a simulated, safe, yet highly immersive driving environment. The 24 participants included male drivers aged 18 to 25 susceptible to risky driving and phone use. A phenomenological framework was used to analyze their accounts of the experience of boredom while driving. RESULTS Results indicate that situations giving rise to driver boredom include low traffic, slow or constant speed, and routine drives. Feelings comprising the experience were frustration, vigilance, relaxing, autopilot, mind wandering, and discomfort. Coping mechanisms manifest themselves in approach strategies related to the driving task such as speeding, which are often dangerous, and avoidance strategies, which include phone use. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that driver boredom bears similarities to the experience of boredom at work (unlike boredom at home) due to the situational constraints, where people feel stuck, trapped, or obliged to remain vigilant. PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS The findings present an opportunity for the road safety and automotive technology community to address the issue of under-stimulation through safety interventions aimed at increased task engagement. Our work can also aid in investigating driver experiences in partially automated driving, which is likely to induce boredom as well.

Zombies on the road: a holistic design approach to balancing gamification and safe driving

This paper explores novel driving experiences that make use of gamification and augmented reality in the car. We discuss our design considerations, which are grounded in road safety psychology and video game design theory. We aim to address the tension between safe driving practices and player engagement. Specifically, we propose a holistic, iterative approach inspired by game design cognition and share our insights generated through the application of this process. We present preliminary game concepts that blend digital components with physical elements from the driving environment. We further highlight how this design process helped us to iteratively evolve these concepts towards being safer while maintaining fun. These insights and game design cognition itself will be useful to the AutomotiveUI community investigating similar novel driving experiences.

Designing Gamified Applications that Make Safe Driving More Engaging

Low levels of engagement while driving can pose road safety risks, e.g., inattention during low traffic or routine trips. Interactive technologies that increase task engagement could therefore offer safety benefits, e.g., through performance feedback, increased challenge, and incentives. As a means to build upon these notions, we chose to explore gamification of the driving task. The research aim was to study how to design gamified applications that make safe driving more engaging. We present six design lenses which bring into focus considerations most relevant to creating engaging car applications. A user study enhanced our understanding of design requirements and revealed user personas to support the development of such applications. These lenses and personas informed two prototypes, which we evaluated in driving simulator studies. Our results indicate that the gamified conditions increased driver engagement and reduced driving speeds. As such, our work contributes towards the design of engaging applications that are both appropriate to the safety-critical driving context and compelling to users.

From road distraction to safe driving

Boredom and low levels of task engagement while driving can pose road safety risks, e.g., inattention during low traffic, routine trips, or semi-automated driving. Digital technology interventions that increase task engagement, e.g., through performance feedback, increased challenge, and incentives (often referred to as gamification), could therefore offer safety benefits. To explore the impact of such interventions, we conducted experiments in a high-fidelity driving simulator with thirty-two participants. In two counterbalanced conditions (control and intervention), we compared driving behaviour, physiological arousal, and subjective experience. Results indicate that the gamified boredom intervention reduced unsafe coping mechanisms such as speeding while promoting anticipatory driving. We can further infer that the intervention not only increased ones attention and arousal during the intermittent gamification challenges, but that these intermittent stimuli may also help sustain ones attention and arousal in between challenges and throughout a drive. At the same time, the gamified condition led to slower hazard reactions and short off-road glances. Our contributions deepen our understanding of driver boredom and pave the way for engaging interventions for safety critical tasks. Our driving simulator study addresses safety risks posed by boredom and low task engagement.A gamified intervention is studied as a means to increase engagement in the safe driving task.The intervention reduced speeding while promoting anticipatory driving.We infer that gamification may increase and sustain attention and arousal throughout a drive.

CoastMaster: An Ambient Speedometer to Gamify Safe Driving

We present CoastMaster, a smartphone application that serves as an ambient speedometer and driving game display. Our work is motivated by the need to re-engage drivers in the driving task, e.g., in situations where manoeuvering the vehicle is straightforward and does not require high levels of engagement. CoastMaster supports drivers during speed limit changes by (a) re-engaging them in the driving task, and; (b) providing feedback on driving behaviour. In a simulator study (N=24), we compare a gamified and a non-gamified interface with regards to user experience, driving performance, and visual distraction. Our results indicate an increase in hedonic quality and driver engagement as well as a decrease in speed violations through the gamified condition. At the same time, the gamified version leads to longer glances towards the display suggesting visual distraction. Our study findings inform specific design recommendations for ambient interfaces and gamified driving.

Engaged Drivers–Safe Drivers: Gathering Real-Time Data from Mobile and Wearable Devices for Safe-Driving Apps

Regardless of punitive strategies such as fines and demerit points, drivers continue to bring their own devices into cars and use them while driving. In this chapter, we explore the opportunities for gamified safe-driving apps provided by real-time data gathered from mobile and wearable devices. The study is grounded in our interest in providing engaging experiences for drives that otherwise lack engagement, both in manual and semi-automated vehicles. We developed BrakeMaster, a smartphone app built around vehicle and road data, and evaluated it in a simulator study looking at system performance, usability, and affect. We found the app to perform responsively and accurately, and self-reported data indicate good usability and increased pleasure. Besides exploring vehicle and road data, we investigated wearable activity monitors for gathering driver data such as arousal. Consumer wearables are more cost and size effective than advanced biofeedback systems and are capable of revealing heart rate patterns and trends across drives. We conclude that road and particularly vehicle data can be leveraged to develop novel driving experiences, whereas driver data is more challenging to exploit in this unique design context.

Workshop on Navigating Autonomous Cars: The Opportunities of HD Maps on User Experience

In this half-day workshop, we explore the opportunities of live (or real-time) high-definition (HD) maps for the user experience of autonomous driving. To date, HD maps tend to be optimized for machine-readability, enabling autonomous driving systems to anticipate upcoming maneuvers. In our workshop, we want to unfold the possibilities of HD maps as a rich source for novel driving experiences, in-car entertainment or innovative location-based services. We will ideate, prototype and discuss new, radical or provocative user experiences that are grounded in the contextual, real-time datasets provided by HD maps. The outcome of the workshop will be twofold: first, an agenda for future research projects based on ideated use cases and job-stories of HD maps. Second, we will conceptualize a diverse range of sketches, storyboards or (paper) prototypes enabling a hands-on exploration of future driving experiences with HD maps.

Thinking Like Disney: Supporting the Disney Method Using Ambient Feedback Based on Group Performance

The Disney method is a collaborative creativity technique that uses three roles - dreamer, realist and critic - to facilitate the consideration of different perspectives on a topic. Especially for novices it is important to obtain guidance in applying this method. One way is providing groups with a trained moderator. However, feedback about the group’s behavior might interrupt the flow of the idea finding process. We built and evaluated a system that provides ambient feedback to a group about the distribution of their statements among the three roles. Our preliminary field study indicates that groups supported by the system contribute more and roles are used in a more balanced way while the visualization does not disrupt the group work.