Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation systems were amongst the top selling consumer technologies in 2008 and research has indicated that such technologies could affect driving behaviour. In this paper, we study how different output configurations (audio, visual and audio-visual) of a GPS system affect driving behaviour and performance. We conducted field experiments in real traffic with 30 subjects. Our results illustrated that visual output not only causes a substantial amount of eye glances, but also led to a decrease in driving performance. Adding audio output decreased the number of eye glances, but we found no significant effects on driving performance. Although the audio configuration implied much fewer eye glances and improved driving performance, several participants expressed preference for the audio/visual output.

With a growing number of in-vehicle systems integrated in contemporary cars, the risk of driver distraction and lack of attention on the primary task of driving is increasing. One major research area concerns eyesoff-the-road and mind-off-the-road that are manifested in different ways for input and output techniques. In this paper, we investigate in-vehicle systems input and output techniques to compare their effects on driving behavior and attention. We compare four techniques touch and gesture (input) and visual and audio (output) in a driving simulator. Our results showed that the separation of input and output is non-trivial. Gesture input resulted in significantly fewer eye glances compared to touch input, but also resulted in poorer primary driving task performance. Further, using audio as output resulted in significantly fewer eye glances, but on the other hand also longer task completion times and inferior primary driving task performance compared to visual output.