UBICOMP/ISWC ’16 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2016, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY

Smart Glasses with a Peripheral Vision
Display
Takuro Nakuo
Keio Media Design
a8111140@kmd.keio.ac.jp

Abstract

Kai Kunze
Keio Media Design
kai@kmd.keio.ac.jp

We present a demonstration of an initial peripheral vision
glasses prototype. We can display patterns in the peripheral vision of the user. A simple use case is to show notifications. Up to 8 different notification types can be distinguished. We also suggest to use it to modify walking
speed of users (depending on the animations people tendto speed up or slow down).

Author Keywords
peripheral vision; smart eye wear; glasses

ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]:
MiscellaneousIntroduction
Smart eye wear is an interesting new computing field. As alot of the human senses are located on the head, it makes
an interesting location for both sensing and actuation.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.
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UbiComp/ISWC’16 Adjunct, September 12-16, 2016, Heidelberg, Germany
ACM 978-1-4503-4462-3/16/09.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2968219.2971393

341

There are plenty of works discussing head mounted computers with displays for augmented reality applications ormicro interactions. In this work however we focus on peripheral vision, as we believe there are a lot of interesting
application cases for peripheral vision interaction in virtualand augmented reality. Most interestingly, it seems walking

UBICOMP/ISWC ’16 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2016, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY

trajectories and speed can be influenced over peripheral
vision [2, 3].
The contributions of this demonstration paper are as follows: (1) We show our initial prototypes [5], (2) we let theusers experience 8 notifications on the display, (3) we try toalter users walking speeds using the glasses.

Approach
As mentioned before, we want to evaluate effects related toperipheral vision for interactions in virtual and augmentedreality. Complimentary to other research using peripheral vision we implement our display in an unobtrusive eye
glasses design. Most of our senses including the dominantvision are on the head, making the human skull a perfectlocation for interaction devices. Eyeglasses are publicly accepted accessories, often worn continuously throughout
the day, rendering them an ideal platform for unobtrusive
information delivery. Our final goal is controlling the humanmotion without consciousness.

Figure 1: Concept of peripheral
vision and the two prototype
glasses used for the experiments.

the device and getting notifications. The users can selectthe activity they want to do, e.g. watch a movie, walk etc.
They then get an introduction to the 8 different notifications
we can show on the device, perform the activity and in random intervals get a notification over the glasses. The second demonstration is the most interesting one. We can alter
the movement speed slightly. Showing fast moving bars
from front to back on the displays make users move relatively slower to before. The user walks first with the device acertain area(should be around 10 meters),then we start theanimation on the display and the user is supposed to walkthe same distance again with the same speed as before.
Usually users walk slower the second time.

Initial Notification Experiments

For details please refer to the previous publication [5]. Our
initial application case focuses on explicit output: signaling to the user. We want to answer the questions "Can auser recognize patterns displayed on our glasses?", "Howmany different patterns can a user recognize?" and "Canthe glasses be used to give the users information in an unPrototypes
obtrusive way while they are working or engaged in otherWe presented an initial prototype wit a single peripheral
tasks?". For these questions we designed so far 2 initial exdisplay to be utilized for unobtrusive notifications [5]. We
periments. The first is explorative using a various pattern
extended this prototype with another display. It consists
animations (we will refer to them as patterns for the rest ofof a small Arduino NANO board embedded in a 3d printedthe paper) addressing part of the two first questions. Theglasses design and two small 8*8 dot matrix modules (OSL641501 second looks into the last question giving the user some- ARA) on the left and right side of the glasses (see Figure"distracting" tasks while randomly presenting them with pat1). The LED module is inclined by around 20 degrees anterns on the display. Each light movement was shown 0.7
optimal position for the peripheral vision. The glasses deseconds, and the users reactions were observed.
sign by 3DCAD software and printed by a 3D printer. See
Figure 1 for details.
Explorative Experiments
For the explorative experiments we designed 8 LED dot patEnvisioned Interactions
tern animations based on information about the peripheral
We suggest two demonstrations that can be done in parallel
vision system and the limitations of the 8*8 dot matrix. The
by two users. The frst demonstration consists of wearing
patterns used for the first experiment are depicted in Figure342

SESSION: DEMOS

2.

Figure 2: 8 different notification
types to be shown on the glasses.

Figure 3: Confusion Matrix
Exploration Experiment

Each pattern ashes exactly 0.7 sec, this is approximately
double of the mean time an average human can recognize
movement using his peripheral vision. Pattern 1 and 2 arehorizontal movements (left to right, right to left respectively).
Pattern 3 and 4 are vertical (up to down, down to up). Pattern 5 is a "ripple" movement originating in the middle of
the LED matrix (4x4 LEDs) towards the outside. Pattern 6
is a movement from both sides to the center. Pattern 7 issimilar to Pattern 1, yet includes waves (not straight lines).
Pattern 8 is a radial movement. For the rst experimental
design we recruited 7 participants (age average 24, 1 female). The participants sit still and at random intervals they
see a random stimulus 7 for each pattern, 56 per user, 392
in total. The participants need to say out loud in case theyrecognize a pattern and have to say which pattern they recognize.
Distraction Experiments
For the second experimental setup we wondered if the information display will work also if the user is occupied byanother task. We selected "watching a video" as task, theusers watch a youtube video 1. From experiences from thefirst experiment we limited the stimuli to patterns 1, 3, 4, 5and 6. The rest of the experimental setup is the same asabove: the same user participated and the same random
occurrences of the patterns and animation duration.

Figure 4: Confusion Matrix
Exploration Experiment

DISCUSSION AND RESULTS
Figure 4 summarizes the results of the first experiments,
downwards you see the number of patterns and towards theright are the stimuli the users reported. This shows the usefulness of our smart glasses. The vertical movements seemto perform best (pattern 3 and 4). One possible explanation is that most of our visual stimulation we receive from343

peripheral vision is horizontal. Therefore, vertical movements might be more noticeable as they don’t occur so often in ordinary life. The Exploration Experiment showed thatour glasses can present information to the users and gavesome evidence about selected presentation patterns. The
Distraction Experiment demonstrate the presentation abilityof the glasses in situations with a more dynamic stimuli. As
for the first experiment, the results are depicted in Figure
5. The vertical axis shows the randomly presented movement of light, and the horizontal axis shows the answer ofthe subjects. There are slight confusions between up anddown movements and the two full screen animations (5 and6 ripple and moving to the middle).

Potential Applications
The most straight forward application cases are notifications. The current prototype system can already be used for
this, as least 5 different states can be communicated to theuser with sufficient recognition accuracy (at least for "casual" notifications). The display LEDs are not so bright so
the notification might not be seen by somebody else (e.g.
the person you are talking to). Yet, this still has to be evaluated.
However, more interesting is to use the device for movement related illusions (as some of the related work already
explored for VR applications [3]). Therefore interesting application cases are for us also in sports or in other movement related activities.

Application Scenarios
The most straight forward application cases are notifications. The current prototype system can already be used for
this, as least 5 different states can be communicated to theuser with sufficient recognition accuracy (at least for "casual" notifications). The display LEDs are not so bright soUBICOMP/ISWC ’16 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 12-16, 2016, HEIDELBERG, GERMANY

the notifications cannot be seen by somebody else (e.g. theperson you are talking to). Yet, this still has to be evaluated.

currently redesigning the glasses so the there is a larger
display area.

However, more interesting is to use the device for movement related illusions. Users can try out the display to change
their movement speed (e.g. let them walk slower or faster
depending on the animation shown on the glasses). Also
we can alter their trajectory slightly. However this does notwork for all users so far.

REFERENCES

Related Work

Figure 5: User Walking with theglasses.

Closest to our approach seems a patent from Andes et al.
They also describe a peripheral display to convey information unobtrusively. However, as other approaches they focus on a single LED ring on top or below they eye [1]. Also
close to our apporach, Poppinga et al. use peripherial vision on ambient glasses for navigation tasks [4]. However,they use single LEDs on different positions on the glasses
frame and no motion animations.
Okano induces the illusion of motion by stimulating theusers peripheral vision with still images and animations [3].
There are a couple of notification systems on glasses.
Most of them use single LEDs and don’t present movement/motion. 1 ’2
To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation of a larger low
resolution display for peripheral vision interactions.

Conclusion
We present an initial prototype for peripheral vision glasses.
The demonstration entails notifications for implicit interactions as well as a pattern to alter the walking speed ofusers. The later does not work for all users yet. We are1
2

http://www.weonglasses.com
http://fun-iki.com

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