Tim Claudius Stratmann

Effects of location and fade-in time of (audio-)visual cues on response times and success-rates in a dual-task experiment

While performing multiple competing tasks at the same time, e.g., when driving, assistant systems can be used to create cues to direct attention towards required information. However, poorly designed cues will interrupt or annoy users and affect their performance. Therefore, we aim to identify cues that are not missed and trigger a quick reaction without changing the primary task performance. We conducted a dual-task experiment in an anechoic chamber with LED-based stimuli that faded in or turned on abruptly and were placed in the periphery or front of a subject. Additionally, a white noise sound was triggered in a third of the trials. The primary task was to react to visual stimuli placed on a screen in front. We observed significant effects on the response times in the screen task when adding sound. Further, participants responded faster to LED stimuli when they faded in.

SuperSelect: An Interactive Superpixel-Based Segmentation Method for Touch Displays

We present the concept of an interactive image segmentation method, which allows a fast and precise extraction of foreground objects from natural images. The method is especially suited for mobile, touch-based devices. The approach combines automatic image segmentation with interactive refinement. In a first step, the user extracts an object using the first stage of the GrabCut algorithm. Any errors in the resulting segmentation can then be corrected via a novel correction step in which the underlying image is over-segmented into superpixels using the SLIC algorithm. The user can select individual superpixels in order to adjust the image segmentation. This image segmentation method is implemented as a full working demo on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.

Demon Hunt - The Role of Endsley’s Demons of Situation Awareness in Maritime Accidents

Human Error is the cause of most maritime accidents. In a majority of the cases the source of the Human Error is a lack of Situation Awareness. Endsley et al. have identified eight causes that corrupt the Situation Awareness of human operators, the so-called Demons of Situation Awareness (SA Demons). We analyzed over five-hundred maritime accident reports for each of the eight SA Demons to provide a ranking of the causes and to identify the most prominent ones. Addressing these SA Demons enables maritime system designers to enhance the Situation Awareness of maritime operators and thereby improves the safety at sea.

Exploring Vibrotactile and Peripheral Cues for Spatial Attention Guidance

For decision making in monitoring and control rooms situation awareness is key. Given the often spacious and complex environments, simple alarms are not sufficient for attention guidance (e.g., on ship bridges). In our work, we explore shifting attention towards the location of relevant entities in large cyber-physical systems. Therefore, we used pervasive displays: tactile displays on both upper arms and a peripheral display. With these displays, we investigated shifting the attention in a seated and standing scenario. In a first user study, we evaluated four distinct cue patterns for each on-body display. We tested seated monitoring limited to 90° in front of the user. In a second study, we continued with the two patterns from the first study for lowest and highest urgency perceived. Here, we investigated standing monitoring in a 360° environment. We found that tactile cues led to faster arousal times than visual cues, whereas the attention shift speed for visual cues was faster than tactile cues.

EyeMR: low-cost eye-tracking for rapid-prototyping in head-mounted mixed reality

Mixed Reality devices can either augment reality (AR) or create completely virtual realities (VR). Combined with head-mounted devices and eye-tracking, they enable users to interact with these systems in novel ways. However, current eye-tracking systems are expensive and limited in the interaction with virtual content. In this paper, we present EyeMR, a low-cost system (below 100

PeriMR: a prototyping tool for head-mounted peripheral light displays in mixed reality

) that enables researchers to rapidly prototype new techniques for eye and gaze interactions. Our system supports mono- and binocular tracking (using Pupil Capture) and includes a Unity framework to support the fast development of new interaction techniques. We argue for the usefulness of EyeMR based on results of a user evaluation with HCI experts.

Juggling 4.0: Learning Complex Motor Skills with Augmented Reality Through the Example of Juggling

Nowadays, Mixed and Virtual Reality devices suffer from a field of view that is too small compared to human visual perception. Although a larger field of view is useful (e.g., conveying peripheral information or improving situation awareness), technical limitations prevent the extension of the field-of-view. A way to overcome these limitations is to extend the field-of-view with peripheral light displays. However, there are no tools to support the design of peripheral light displays for Mixed or Virtual Reality devices. Therefore, we present our prototyping tool PeriMR that allows researchers to develop new peripheral head-mounted light displays for Mixed and Virtual Reality.

Measuring, Understanding, and Classifying News Media Sympathy on Twitter after Crisis Events

Learning new motor skills is a problem that people are constantly confronted with (e.g. to learn a new kind of sport). In our work, we investigate to which extent the learning process of a motor sequence can be optimized with the help of Augmented Reality as a technical assistant. Therefore, we propose an approach that divides the problem into three tasks: (1) the tracking of the necessary movements, (2) the creation of a model that calculates possible deviations and (3) the implementation of a visual feedback system. To evaluate our approach, we implemented the idea by using infrared depth sensors and an Augmented Reality head-mounted device (HoloLens). Our results show that the system can give an efficient assistance for the correct height of a throw with one ball. Furthermore, it provides a basis for the support of a complete juggling sequence.

ShoulderTap - Pneumatic On-body Cues to Encode Directions

This paper investigates bias in coverage between Western and Arab media on Twitter after the November 2015 Beirut and Paris terror attacks. Using two Twitter datasets covering each attack, we investigate how Western and Arab media differed in coverage bias, sympathy bias, and resulting information propagation. We crowdsourced sympathy and sentiment labels for 2,390 tweets across four languages (English, Arabic, French, German), built a regression model to characterize sympathy, and thereafter trained a deep convolutional neural network to predict sympathy. Key findings show: (a) both events were disproportionately covered (b) Western media exhibited less sympathy, where each media coverage was more sympathetic towards the country affected in their respective region (c) Sympathy predictions supported ground truth analysis that Western media was less sympathetic than Arab media (d) Sympathetic tweets do not spread any further. We discuss our results in light of global news flow, Twitter affordances, and public perception impact.

RadialLight: exploring radial peripheral LEDs for directional cues in head-mounted displays

A common way to display information via tactile output is to use vibration motors. However, vibration is often perceived as a rather artificial, even unpleasant cue. We explore a novel method based on pneumatic cues to provide a more natural tactile output. We use two airbags positioned at the back of the user, at shoulder height to give navigational cues. We utilize the shoulder tap metaphor to give directions to the left, right or ahead. We compare the pneumatic cue to vibro-tactile cue at the same position. Our Results show, that the pneumatic cue was rated as significantly less urgent than vibro-tactile cue. As there were no significant differences in error rate, annoyance and usability, we rate ShoulderTap as eligible alternative to vibro-tactile cues.