Modern cars include a host of secondary in-vehicle technology that requires control by the driver. Center-stack touch-screen displays are a popular way to accommodate the proliferation of additional functions through a flexible and scalable interface. However, touch-screens require visual attention for manual selection and provide poor tactile feedback to the driver, which can pose a significant risk while the vehicle is in motion. Inspired by a bimodal control approach, we propose the use of a steering wheel mounted thumb-based gestural interface as part of a larger multi-modal interaction strategy for human vehicle interaction. Following the spirit of Guiard's (1987) model of bimanual control, a small set of simple gestures for the right hand select appropriate functions within the mode selected by the left hand. A pilot study shows promise of this approach over other, free-form gesturebased methods of interaction.

Providing better information access to blind users is an important goal in the context of accessible interface design. Similarly, designers of user interfaces benefit from alternative interface techniques for usage scenarios in which visual (graphical) interfaces are either not possible or suboptimal. In our study we compared a traditional serial aural presentation of menu items to a new simultaneous aural presentation of up to seven menu items. These continuously present VoiceScapes allow the user to actively scan the auditory display to find the most appropriate command. While VoiceScapes are more difficult and attentionally more demanding than other formats of presentation, extended use might allow experienced users to more efficiently navigate complex menu hierarchies. A first pilot experiment with 13 sighted participants presented here tested the basic viability of this approach.

This project examines questions of discernibility and presentation methods for safety-critical driving messages. A driving simulator experiment tested two methods of providing safety messages: distinct (with all alerts having distinct auditory and visual components) and master (a common visual and auditory alert) presentations. Participants completed drives that contained a safety critical event, with and without an alert, and reported their perceptions of the alert’s meaning and hazard location. No significant differences were observed in participants’ ability to identify the location of the referent hazard. There were significant differences in participants’ ability to assess the meaning of the alert: the distinct group displayed higher overall performance as compared to the master group. Implications of the study for design guidance and potential future research topics are discussed.

The paper provides information relevant to the development of driver and pedestrian safety systems by examining drivers’ responses to infrastructure-based safety messages (DII) with a redundant in-vehicle display component. A driving simulator was used to create a conflict situation which required an immediate driver response to avoid a collision. At the start of the event, a pedestrian was occluded by a truck at an intersection. Partway through the event, the pedestrian dashed into the road and into the driver’s path. When redundant visual in-vehicle alerting messages were provided, drivers released the throttle more quickly, engaged the brake more quickly, and had longer minimum time to collision relative to the baseline condition which lacked visual alerts. This was an improvement over the DII-only condition, where drivers did not brake more quickly relative to baseline and had only marginally longer minimum time to collision compared with the baseline condition. The findings suggest that redundant in-vehicle message information provides a benefit to many drivers over systems that use only infrastructure-based safety systems in vehicle–pedestrian conflicts.

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