Nicolas Louveton

Towards A Taxonomy of Autonomous Vehicle Handover Situations

This paper proposes a taxonomy of autonomous vehicle handover situations with a particular emphasis on situational awareness. It focuses on a number of research challenges such as: legal responsibility, the situational awareness level of the driver and the vehicle, the knowledge the vehicle must have of the drivers driving skills as well as the in-vehicle context. The taxonomy acts as a starting point for researchers and practitioners to frame the discussion on this complex problem.

Intersection crossing considered as intercepting a moving traffic gap: Effects of task and environmental constraints

Safely crossing an intersection requires that drivers actively control their approach to the intersection with respect to characteristics of the flow of incoming traffic. To further our understanding of the perceptual-motor processes involved in this demanding manoeuvre, we designed a driving simulator experiment in which 13 participants actively negotiated intersections by passing through a gap in the train of incoming traffic. Task constraints were manipulated by varying the size of the traffic gap and the initial conditions with respect to the time of arrival of the traffic gap at the intersection. Environment constraints were manipulated by varying the intersection geometry through changes in the angle formed by the crossroads. The results revealed that the task constraints systematically gave rise to continuous and gradual adjustments in approach velocity, initiated well before arriving at the intersection. These functionally appropriate adjustments allowed the drivers to safely cross the intersection, generally just slightly ahead of the center of the traffic gap. Notwithstanding the fact that the geometry of the intersection did not affect the spatiotemporal constraints of the crossing task, approach behavior varied systematically over geometries, suggesting that drivers rely on the traffic gaps bearing angle. Overall, the pattern of results is indicative of a continuous coupling between perception and action, analogous to that observed in locomotor interception tasks.

Comparison of active proximity radars for the wearable devices

Two methods of object position and movement estimation in relation to the user of smart glasses were investigated. An active infrared and ultrasonic methods of the obstacle detection were presented and compared. Application of these methods depend on active transducers type (physical medium used), geometry and surface properties of detected objects and their movement direction and speed. In the article properties of both detectors were compared and applicability of both methods in mobile, battery operated environment such as eGlasses platform were compared.

MaDSAV: maintaining driving skills in semi-autonomous vehicles

In the future autonomous vehicles will drive on our roads. It is unlikely that we will immediately move from manual to fully autonomous vehicles, instead the mix will change over time and include a large number of semi-autonomous vehicles. As a result human drivers will need to take over in specific situations (e.g., when sensors fail) and there will be an interplay between autonomous systems and human agents. However, human drivers will not be able to practice driving so regularly. Our assumption is, that the reliance on semi-autonomous systems will lead to a deterioration in driving skills. In this paper, we present a three year project called MaDSAV (Maintaining Driving Skills in semi-Autonomous Vehicles), which tackles this problem.

Intercepting a moving traffic gap while avoiding collision with lead and trail vehicles: Gap-related and boundary-related influences on drivers' speed regulations during approach to an intersection

Using a fixed-base driving simulator, 15 participants actively drove their vehicle across a rural road toward an intersection. Their task was to safely cross the intersection, passing through a gap in the train of incoming traffic. Spatiotemporal task constraints were manipulated by varying the initial conditions (offsets) with respect to the time of arrival of the traffic gap at the intersection. Orthogonally manipulating the motion characteristics of the lead and trail vehicles forming the traffic gap allowed evaluating the influences of the global (gap-related) and local (lead/trail-vehicle-related) aspects of the inter-vehicular interval. The results revealed that the different initial offsets gave rise to functional, continuous and gradual adjustments in approach speed, initiated early on during approach to the intersection. Drivers systematically accelerated during the final stages of approach, on average crossing the gap slightly ahead of the center of the traffic gap. A special-purpose ANOVA demonstrated an influence of (global) gap characteristics such as gap size and speed. Further analyses demonstrated that the motion characteristics of the lead vehicle exerted a stronger influence on approach behavior than the motion characteristics of the trail vehicle. The results are interpreted as signing the online regulation of approach speed, concurrently based on intercepting the (center of the) traffic gap and avoiding collision with the lead and trail vehicles.

Text entry on smart glasses

This paper presents a comparative pilot usability study of Dasher and an on-screen keyboard on a head-mounted display. Interaction logging data was captured along with subjective responses (via the SUS questionnaire). The results indicate that there is a strong need to develop text entry systems for smart glasses rather to simply adopt those that are already available. However, both approaches are useful when there is a need to enter private or sensitive data.

Toward a Characterization of Human Activities using Smart Devices: A Micro/Macro Approach

The emergence of new connected devices has opened up new opportunities and allowed to imagine concepts that bring computer sciences and social sciences closer together. In particular, todays increasingly sophisticated miniature sensors allow to track and understand human activities and behavior with a great precision. Taking different approaches and perspectives, we use in this paper smartwatches and smartglasses to explore these behaviors and show that these objects, considered by many as gadgets, have an important role to play in understanding the lives of individuals. The main objective of this work is to introduce two new scales of activity detection, which lacks a formal and consistent definition in the literature. First, we propose a model that precisely detects and interprets movements made by a person wearing smart devices. Then, we use this model to show different interactions between those micro-activities and bigger chunks of behaviors we call macro-activities. Using a new concept based on 3D visualization, we finally show that combining those two scales and using a limited dataset, it is possible to distinguish between different individuals when they are performing very similar activities. The findings of this study lead the way to enhanced user profiling.

Driving while using a smartphone-based mobility application: Evaluating the impact of three multi-choice user interfaces on visual-manual distraction

Innovative in-car applications provided on smartphones can deliver real-time alternative mobility choices and subsequently generate visual-manual demand. Prior studies have found that multi-touch gestures such as kinetic scrolling are problematic in this respect. In this study we evaluate three prototype tasks which can be found in common mobile interaction use-cases. In a repeated-measures design, 29 participants interacted with the prototypes in a car-following task within a driving simulator environment. Task completion, driving performance and eye gaze have been analysed. We found that the slider widget used in the filtering task was too demanding and led to poor performance, while kinetic scrolling generated a comparable amount of visual distraction despite it requiring a lower degree of finger pointing accuracy. We discuss how to improve continuous list browsing in a dual-task context.

Understanding the everyday use of head-worn computers

Early research on head-worn computers (HWCs) has focused on hardware and specific applications. However, there is little research about the everyday usage of head-worn computers in particular aspects such as: context of use, social acceptance across different activities, audiences and interaction techniques. This paper provides insights into the use of head-worn computers by capturing the opinions of novice and expert users through a survey, a three-week diary study, and interviews. The overarching finding is that the context of use is critical, either due to the need to support micro-interactions, or because the interaction paradigm itself should depend on the context of use.

Colorizer: Smart Glasses Aid for the Colorblind

We present a smart glasses application for helping colorblind people to distinguish problematic colors in daily life. The prototype processes a live video stream from the mobile camera, remaps colors according to the user needs, and displays the augmented result. Color transformation ensures high contrast between colors which are otherwise indistinguishable for the user.