The design and field observation of a haptic notification system for timing awareness during oral presentations

Abstract

To moderate oral presentations a chair must manage time, and communicate time parameters to speakers through a variety of means. But speakers often miss time cues, chairs cannot confirm their receipt, and the broken dialogue can be a sideshow for the audience. We developed HaNS, a wireless wrist-worn chair-speaker Haptic Notification System that delivers tactile cues for time-managing oral presentations, and performed field observations at university research seminars and two mid-sized academic conferences (input from 66 speakers, 21 chairs, and 65 audience members). Results indicate that HaNS can improve a user's awareness of time, facilitate chair-speaker coordination, and reduce distraction of speaker and audience through its private communication channel. Eliminating overruns will require improvement in speaker 'internal' control, which our results suggest HaNS can also support given practice. We conclude with design guidelines for both conference-deployed and personal timing tools, using touch or another notification modality.

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“…Studies falling in this category researched how to present support by using augmented reality feedback for specific nonverbal communication factors [9], improving the voice quality of the presenter by using a smart synthesizer [17], improving the timing of a presentation by giving haptic feedback [24], etc. The second group studies how to support the training of public speaking skills.…”

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“…Most obviously, this might include features such as PowerPoint's presenter view, which can be seen only by the speaker, but research in this area has explored other means of providing subtle notifications to presenters, such as by haptic feedback [25].…”

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“…Tutor systems presenting support for these skills have already been studied for scenarios such as job interviews [12], [13] and public speaking [14], [15], [16], [17]. These public speaking tutor systems use different approaches and focus on different aspects.…”

“…the Google Glass, to present the user with feedback for specific nonverbal communication factors while giving a presentation. The study in [15] explored the use of an armband that provided haptic feedback to the user about the timing of her presentation whereas [16] designed an environment to help learners to overcome their public speaking anxiety by giving presentations in front of a virtual audience. In addition, this system is also able to make an assessment of some nonverbal aspects of the presentations.…”