Effects of modality, urgency and situation on responses to multimodal warnings for drivers

Politis, Ioannis (2016) Effects of modality, urgency and situation on responses to multimodal warnings for drivers. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Signifying road-related events with warnings can be highly beneficial, especially when imminent attention is needed. This thesis describes how modality, urgency and situation can influence driver responses to multimodal displays used as warnings. These displays utilise all combinations of audio, visual and tactile modalities, reflecting different urgency levels. In this way, a new rich set of cues is designed, conveying information multimodally, to enhance reactions during driving, which is a highly visual task. The importance of the signified events to driving is reflected in the warnings, and safety-critical or non-critical situations are communicated through the cues. Novel warning designs are considered, using both abstract displays, with no semantic association to the signified event, and language-based ones, using speech. These two cue designs are compared, to discover their strengths and weaknesses as car alerts. The situations in which the new cues are delivered are varied, by simulating both critical and non-critical events and both manual and autonomous car scenarios. A novel set of guidelines for using multimodal driver displays is finally provided, considering the modalities utilised, the urgency signified, and the situation simulated.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Keywords: Multimodal, warnings, driving, HCI, urgency, audio, visual, tactile.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; T Technology > TL Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Funder's Name: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
• Supervisor's Name: Stephen, Professor Brewster
• Date of Award: 2016
• Depositing User: Dr Ioannis Politis
• Unique ID: glathesis:2016-7857
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 10 Jan 2017 17:06
• Last Modified: 16 Feb 2017 09:04
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/7857