Multimodal and visual-only air gesture systems for navigating menus in the vehicle were developed and compared to a conventional direct touch system in a driving simulator using various distraction metrics. Participants using the multimodal air gesture system exhibited safer secondary task dwell patterns, but took longer to complete tasks and reported higher workload compared to the touch system.

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Three novel interfaces for navigating a hierarchical menu while driving were experimentally evaluated. Prototypes utilized redundant visual and auditory feedback (multimodal), and were compared to a conventional direct touch interface. All three multimodal prototypes employed an external touchpad separate from the infotainment display in order to afford simple eyes-free gesturing. Participants performed a basic driving task while concurrently using these prototypes to perform menu selections. Mean lateral lane deviation, eye movements, secondary task speed, and self-reported workload were assessed for each condition. Of all conditions, swiping the touchpad to move one-by-one through menu items yielded significantly smaller lane deviations than direct touch. In addition, in the serial swipe condition, the same time spent looking at the prototype was distributed over a longer interaction time. The remaining multimodal conditions allowed users to feel around a pie or list menu to find touchpad zones corresponding to menu items, allowing for either exploratory browsing or shortcuts. This approach, called GRUV, was ineffective compared to serial swiping and direct touch, possibly due its uninterruptable interaction pattern and overall novelty. The proposed explanation for the performance benefits of the serial swiping condition was that it afforded flexible sub tasking and incremental progress, in addition to providing multimodal output.

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