Towards a Taxonomy for In-Vehicle Interactions Using Wearable Smart Textiles: Insights from a User-Elicitation Study

Abstract

Textiles are a vital and indispensable part of our clothing that we use daily. They are very flexible, often lightweight, and have a variety of application uses. Today, with the rapid developments in small and flexible sensing materials, textiles can be enhanced and used as input devices for interactive systems. Clothing-based wearable interfaces are suitable for in-vehicle controls. They can combine various modalities to enable users to perform simple, natural, and efficient interactions while minimizing any negative effect on their driving. Research on clothing-based wearable in-vehicle interfaces is still underexplored. As such, there is a lack of understanding of how to use textile-based input for in-vehicle controls. As a first step towards filling this gap, we have conducted a user-elicitation study to involve users in the process of designing in-vehicle interactions via a fabric-based wearable device. We have been able to distill a taxonomy of wrist and touch gestures for in-vehicle interactions using a fabric-based wrist interface in a simulated driving setup. Our results help drive forward the investigation of the design space of clothing-based wearable interfaces for in-vehicle secondary interactions.

Design of Interactions for Handheld Augmented Reality Devices Using Wearable Smart Textiles: Findings from a User Elicitation Study

“…We used our HAR app to introduce all 27 tasks (most of the tasks are dichotomous pairs) in the same order to all the participants. Though we set a one-minute time limit to think of three different gestures for each task, all participants thought of their choice of three gestures within 45 s. Therefore, as mentioned in the results section, our user-elicited gestures using hand-worn interface for a specific set of HAR tasks achieved a medium agreement, which is aligned with the previous elicitation study using non-functional fabric-based prototype [39].…”

“…Also, we found that complex gestures were less preferred for discrete (17.259%) than continuous tasks (50.22%), showing a clear preference for simple gestures for discrete tasks. These findings align with the prior elicitation study using fabric-based interface to perform interactions with in-vehicle systems [39].…”

“…In this work, we adopted and extended a methodology proposed by [39] to uniquely identify usable gestures for HAR interactions. We defined all user-preferred possible wrist and thumb-to-index touch gestures using our prototype before the study began, and grouped the elicited gestures using the unique gesture code.…”

“…Our study explored the scenario where a fabric-based hand-worn device would be available to users to perform interactions with HAR devices. We followed the methodology proposed by [39] to identify user-preferred thumb-to-index touch and wrist gestures for HAR interactions using a hand-worn fabric-based prototype (see Figure 1a).…”

“…Therefore, by following their method, interface designers are unable to recommend a suitable sensing technology to recognize their user-elicited gestures. To address these issues, most recently, Nanjappan et al [39] co-designed a prototype with potential end-users and conducted an elicitation study for a fabric-based wearable prototype to devise a taxonomy of wrist and touch gestures. Their non-functional prototype allowed the users to physically feel the affordance of the interface to perform their preferred gestures that are implementable in the functional version of the device.…”