Among many of their countless dismounted roles, U.S. Air Force Battlefield Airmen must navigate in unfamiliar environments with many potential threats while performing their mission objectives. The effectiveness of navigating with a map and compass is compromised in reduced visibility conditions, such as in fog or during nighttime operations. Moreover, focusing on a map draws attention away from the immediate surroundings and reduces their ability to detect threats. To ameliorate this problem, we prototyped auditory and tactile navigation displays controlled only by a mobile phone using its built-in GPS and compass. The auditory and tactile displays direct users towards their destination with 3D audio and vibrotactile cues, respectively. We evaluated the navigation displays on a waypoint navigation task. Results suggest that auditory and tactile displays can guide users to their destination as effectively as a visual display (i.e., a GPS enabled map). Initial findings justify further development of multimodal navigation displays to increase the efficiency of Battlefield Airmen in land navigation tasks.
BACKGROUND
Loss of awareness in one's immediate surroundings can have devastating results when navigating. For instance, military operators must often navigate in unfamiliar environments and must be able to detect nearby threats to survive. Visual displays such as paper or digital maps can draw visual attention away from one's environment. We developed a navigation display that guides a user through a series of waypoints by playing a 3D audio tone over headphones or vibrating a tactor on an array around the torso. We evaluated the navigation display by having participants navigate through 32 waypoints in an open field. In addition to evaluating auditory and vibrotactile cues, we considered an analog visual cue, an allocentric map, and an egocentric map. Participants were able to reach all waypoints in every condition. Results suggest that the participants reached waypoints fastest with the egocentric map. Additionally, participants were slightly faster with the auditory cue than with the vibrotactile cue. Subjective workload and usability questionnaires found that both of these conditions were not mentally demanding and highly usable. These results help support the development of eye-free mobile navigation tools.
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