AmbiGlasses - Information in the Periphery of the Visual Field

While more and more digital information becomes available, the demand to access information whenever and wherever increases. However, ubiquitous information provision often interferes with the user's primary tasks such as walking, driving, or reading. In this paper we present a mobile device called AmbiGlasses, a pair of glasses with 12 LEDs that illuminate the periphery of the user's field of view. A conducted user study shows that participants are able to locate the correct LED with 71% accuracy and estimate the rough location of the LED with 92% accuracy. Participants were further asked to exemplary design visualization configurations for four directions. Consistent results show that different participants encode directions with similar patterns. We argue that the AmbiGlasses can therefore be used to convey clear and intuitive navigation instructions. 1 Motivation and Background As the digital revolution is still in progress, the amount of information which is available steadily increases. At the same time mobile phones are frequently used to access this information from anywhere. However, interacting with mobile devices demands the full attention of the user. In contrast to interacting with desktop computers, there are often other competing and more important tasks, such as walking or chatting with a friend, when interacting with a mobile device. This often causes the user to interact with fragmented attention (Oulasvirta et al. 2005). But many mobile applications, such as pedestrian navigation systems, force the user to fully concentrate on the display and thereby distract the user from the environment (Rukzio et al. 2009). To not interfere with the user's primary task a display is needed that is always perceivable and enables a seamless transition from paying no attention to full concentration. AmbiGlasses Information in the Periphery of the Visual Field 2 Figure 1: A mannequin with AmbiGlasses. The glasses consist of 12 LEDs that can be switched on or off separately. In this paper, we investigate information presentation via light which illuminates the periphery of a user's field of view. The aim is to convey information in a continuous but unobtrusive and ambient way. We built a prototype called AmbiGlasses: a lightweight, wearable display which augments the user's field of view with additional information (see Figure 1). It exploits humans' abilities to effectively direct visual attention, combined with a low information density. Thereby, users are enabled to pay attention only if desired and to get relevant information in a fraction of a second. Continuous but ambient and unobtrusive information presentation has received much attention in previous work. Ambient information presentation is always available, thus it enables users to smoothly move the focus of attention to the display and back again (Pousman and Stasko 2006). Ambient displays are usually designed to present information which is important but not critical. Another important aspect of these displays is that they present information permanently and typically reduce the complexity of the presentation to a minimum. Until now, most research on ambient displays focuses on stationary devices. Most existing wearable ambient displays for mobile users which address the visual sense (e.g. Schmidt et al. 2006 and Williams et al. 2006) are not always in the user's field of view. Thus, these are only perceivable as long as the user is explicitly interacting with the device. However, Costanza et al. (2006) use a wearable peripheral display, composed of small LED arrays embedded at the left and right edge of ordinary eyeglasses to deliver subtle notification cues. They showed that the display is effective in notifying its user in a subtle way. Though, they don’t take advantage of the whole frame as a potential information display and use the display in a very limited way, that is for simple notification cues only. Another prominent example for permanent information presentation to mobile users is augmented reality (Caudell and Mizell 1992). Augmented reality (AR) systems embed digital information in a real world scene by registering the visualization with the scene seen by the user. Despite major progress in the AR field robust systems that can be used on a daily basis by the average consumer are still out of reach. A disadvantage is that AR goggles or AmbiGlasses Information in the Periphery of the Visual Field 3 head-up displays present the information directly in the user’s field of view. This augmentation in the centre of the visual field can hardly be ignored and may divert the user’s attention from their primary task. AR on handheld devices (see e.g. Henze et al. 2011) recently received some public attention but only enables explicit interaction. To overcome the limitations of existing visual displays, other modalities for unobtrusive information presentation have been studied. For example, Holland et al. (2002) proposed to continuously present the direction of a destination via spatial audio feedback for pedestrian navigation. Auditory displays, however, compete with environmental noise and it is difficult to find a balance between being hard to notice and being annoying. Therefore, they are not always suited (Hoggan et al. 2009). Tactile displays have also been proposed for providing continuous but unobtrusive navigation information (e.g. van Erp et al. 2005). It has been shown that information presented by tactile displays can be processible even under cognitive load (Duistermaat et al. 2007). However, most of the investigated tactile displays are custom made, bulky, and strictly limited in their degrees of freedom. Thus, in some situations, neither tactile nor auditory interfaces are suitable. In the remainder of this paper we present the design and implementation of the AmbiGlasses prototype (Section 2). We then report from a user study which aimed at finding the basic principles of information presentation with AmbiGlasses (Section 3). We close the paper with a conclusion and outlook to future work (Section 4).