Hello, My name is Kai Holländer I am from the LMU Munich.
Welcome to my brief video abstract of the MobileHCI Publication:
„Save the Smombies App Assisted Street Crossing“.
Please feel free to pause the video if needed.
Smombie is short for Smartphone Zombie, i.e. pedestrians who are distracted by a smartphone.
Using a smartphone while walking in urban traffic is dangerous.
Pedestrians have to split their attention between traffic, walking and using the mobile device.
In previous scientific observeations distracted pedestrians overlooked:
a unicycling clown and money attached to a tree due to inatentional blindness.
In addition, we see a lot of work on external human machine interfaces (eHMIs) for future (fully) automated vehicles.
Some eHMIs are shown here, e.g., an attached face projections or displays.
Such signals might fail to provide clear information in a multi user environment.
the so called scalability problem of eHMIs.
Given the two observations of increasing complexity of vehicle signals and distracted pedestrians.
We investigated whether a smartphone application could prevent dangerous crossing behavior.
This question implies the challenge of an appropriate user interface design.
These are the three design concepts we compared in the final study:
Bars which shows a colored bar at the direction
(left or right on the screen) depending on where the vehicle is approaching from.
Traffic Light which shows a traffic light icon
And Map, which shows a dynamic map of the environment with moving symbols for each entity (pedestrian and vehicle).
As part of the concepts Pedestrians and vehicles are assigned to a safety area.
if both overlap a visual warning accompanied by tactile feedback is issued.
A concept which uses standard Android notifications was not further investigated in the main study,
Since participants rated the concept as rather bad during the pilot study.
Seven out of eight stated that they would probably ignore the notifications.
For the main study we had 24 participants in a within-study design. Trials were counterbalanced with a Latin square.
This resulted in a data set containing 576 cases.
Each guidance method occurred 144 times.
Participants indicated their willingness to cross with an adapted version of the Feeling of Safety Slider by Walker et al.
Here we see an empty graph with an ideal movement of a study run if the vehicle does not yield,
the ideal pedestrians input (blue line) avoids the already mentioned safety area (red part).
and thus a potential collision.
In this graph we see all participants inputs mapped on the previously empty graph right side.
On the left there are the cases where the vehicle yielded (so it was always safe to cross).
The bars concept leads to a rather clean and structured output.
The Traffic Light and map concepts shows more clutter and irregularities.
The baseline means no guidance on the smartphone and leads to an almost chaotic output.
Surprisingly if we look at user preferences we see the same order of concepts:
bars with the best ratings, followed by Traffic Light and Map.
This also accounts for the amount of successful runs.
we conclude that on-screen guidance increases the frequency of successful crossing decisions significantly.
In addition, all participants indicated that they would use the proposed system,preferably with:
an unobtrusive colored bar indicating the safest crossing decision in real-time.
Integrating smartphones into the interaction between vehicles and pedestrians could increase situational awareness
while crossing roads
solve the scalability problem and thus foster pedestrian safety in future traffic scenarios.
We want to emphasize that our goal is not to encourage pedestrians to use a smartphone while participating in traffic
But we aim to protect those who do it anyway.
To this end we present five design recommendations.
Thank you for watching, If you want further information
please have a look at the final paper or get in touch with the authors.