Time-Lag as Limiting Factor for Indoor Walking Navigation

摘要

Several navigation situations can be imagined where visual cueing is not practical or unfeasible, and where the hands are required exclusively for a certain task. The utilization of the sense of touch, as relatively new notification modality, should provide sufficient possibilites to cope with this issue.rnThe focus in this research work is on two questions (i) how the distance encoding schemas affects the overall navigation speed (or in more detail to what level the time lag contributes to the navigation precision) and (ii) if, beside the vibro-tactile stimulation, the transmission of the noise generated by the individual vibration elements influences the speed and/or precision of route guiding. To deal with these questions we have defined and conducted three waypoint following experiments with two different tactor activation methods, one without and the other two with the distance encoded in the vibration patterns. Additionally, we did studies where we masked the noise of the vibration elements and compared the results against the general setting where masking was not applied.rnOur results shows that notification latency led to an increasing number of walking anomalies and consequently affects the walking precision and time to a high degree. Furthermore, we could not find evidence that multimodal stimulation with both vibration force and vibration "noise" tends to result in an increased system performance compared to the system with unimodal feedback using vibrations only.