BIONIC – ‘eyes-free’ design of secondary driving controls

Abstract

The BIONIC project (Blind Operation of In-car Controls) was set-up to develop an ‘eyes-free’ prototype interface, enabling drivers to access secondary and ancillary controls whilst minimising the visual demands within the car. This research was initiated out of concern for the increasing use of multi-function screen based interfaces that place an additional visual workload on the driver. BIONIC has created new guidelines for the design of highly tactile control interfaces, based upon a series of experimental studies and the development of prototype designs that are described in this paper. The first iteration prototype controls were assessed in a driving simulator trial. Second iteration working prototypes were then installed within a Honda Civic demonstrator vehicle and these novel controls were compared to the current interface in on-road trials. A strong emphasis was placed on measures that directly relate to safety, such as the number and duration of glances made to the control and/or display. A reduction in total glance duration of 10% was stated as our target in the grant proposal; the BIONIC interface achieved an overall reduction of 20% and 32% for the HVAC and SAT NAV tasks, respectively. The BIONIC ICE tasks required a 7% increase in total glance duration, but this was a consequence of its poor location in the vehicle due to the constraints of fitting the prototype interface into a production vehicle.

Contributors

J Mark Porter

Conference

Publication date: August 2005

Publication date (Print): August 2005

Pages: 1-8

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Design & Technology, Loughborough University, UK

[2 ]School of Computer Science & Information Technology, University of Nottingham, UK

[3 ]Honda Research & Development Europe, Swindon, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/AD2005.9

Copyright statement: © J Mark Porter et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference 2005, Dundee, Scotland

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference 2005

Conference acronym: AD

Conference number:

Conference location: Dundee, Scotland

Conference date: 23-25 August 2005

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/AD2005.9

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing