Guiding Smombies: Augmenting Peripheral Vision with Low-Cost Glasses to Shift the Attention of Smartphone Users

MoPeDT: A Modular Head-Mounted Display Toolkit to Conduct Peripheral Vision Research

“…Two LED stick modules are attached to the side in the far periphery (Figure 1c). This is conceptually very similar to some peripheral guidance and warning headsets [15,38,52]. The display elements show a moving light dot, thus prompting the user to turn left or right to the object of interest (Figure 5, first two images in the top row).…”

“…Gruenefeld et al developed two LED-based peripheral glasses to shift the attention of smartphone users and prevent accidents due to being distracted [15]. In the first iteration, they used a simple horizontal strip of LEDs, then improved their design by incorporating an LED matrix to show a greater variety of visual cues.…”

“…We compiled a set of requirements by looking at previous work that utilized peripheral cues. The devices shown so far that exclusively augment peripheral vision were designed for specific purposes (e.g., avoiding traffic accidents) or are generally limited to a few selected use cases [4,6,15,22,29,36,38,41,46,52,53]. With MoPeDT, we want to provide a more adaptable advancement of these approaches by proposing a unified and extendable system that allows a wide variety of applications.…”

“…Using just LEDs in the periphery limits the visual expressiveness due to the low number of light-emitting elements compared to higher resolution screens [4,6,15,22,36,38,41,46,52,53]. Similar to Luyten et al [29], our system should support small near-eye LCD displays to allow greater visual expressiveness to display a wide variety of shapes, colors, and animations.…”

“…Researching peripheral vision in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and human-computer interaction (HCI) is hindered by a lack of easy-to-use hardware solutions for applications and experimentation. The existing studies primarily explore the application of peripheral vision for enhancing spatial awareness [13,15,52,56], improving AR/VR experiences by reducing motion sickness or increasing presence [17,35,56], and notifications [6,29]. Those studies show promising results on the use of peripheral displays for AR/VR and HCI.…”