Map Navigation Using a Wearable Mid-air Display

Abstract

Advances in display technologies could soon make wearable mid-air displays-devices that present dynamic images floating in mid-air relative to a mobile user-available. Such devices may enable new input and output modalities compared to current mobile devices, and seamlessly offer information on the go. This paper presents a functional prototype for the purpose of understanding these modalities in more detail, including suitable applications and device placement. We first collected results from an online survey identified map navigation as one of the most desirable applications and suggested placement preferences. Based on these rankings, we built a wearable mid-air display mockup consisting of mobile phone, pico projector, and a holder frame, mountable in two alternative ways: wrist and chest. We then designed an experiment, asking participants to navigate different urban routes using map navigation displayed in mid-air. For map navigation, participants ranked wrist-mount safer than chest-mount. The experiment results validate the use of a wearable mid-air display for map navigation. Based on our online survey and experiment, we offer insights and recommendations for the design of wearable mid-air displays.

Comparing Pedestrian Navigation Methods in Virtual Reality and Real Life

“…Researchers are interested in navigation strategies and performance [24], task load or spatial knowledge acquisition during navigation [1,5,30,31]. There is also a long tradition of building novel and multimodal navigation prototypes [8,27] and comparing them to existing techniques such as turn-by-turn navigation on a mobile device or paper map, using field studies. But evaluating navigation tasks in laboratory settings is also becoming more common.…”

“…There is also a long tradition of building novel and multimodal navigation prototypes [8,27] and comparing them to existing techniques such as turn-by-turn navigation on a mobile device or paper map, using field studies. But evaluating navigation tasks in laboratory settings is also becoming more common.…”

“…Using mobile devices to navigate has become a very frequent task, making mobile map apps the de facto standard for navigation. Still a diverse portfolio of novel navigation methods and multimodal interfaces is continuously developed, such as tactile belts [24], wearable displays [8], drones for displaying spatial information [28] or smartwatch-navigation interfaces [33]. Typically, these methods have been compared against a baseline technique (e.g.…”

WristOrigami

“…We observed a different usage pattern for folding. Within the 51 usages of folding, 24 were used in the collated format to control the overall content across different displays, including camera panning/zooming (9), fast forward/backward for video (6), previous/next viewing items (5), and adjusting display parameters (4, e.g. brightness, contrast, etc.).…”

“…Given that the wrist is a candidate for tasks where hand-eye coordination is naturally required, extending the interaction surface on a wrist device could be a strategy concordant with user preferences. Researchers have proposed various solutions to overcome the limited interaction space of smartwatches, including coordinating interactions between smartwatch and larger interactive surfaces [17], embedding extra sensors in the watch [40], projecting/displaying onto the forearm [28], equipping an additional and separate display [4,33], or leveraging mid-air input [6].…”