=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3297/short4
|storemode=property
|title=Evaluation of Active Patterns on Direction Instruction for Pedestrians
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3297/short4.pdf
|volume=Vol-3297
|authors=Yu Tamura,Hidehiko Shishido,Yoshinari Kameda
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/apmar/TamuraSK22
}}
==Evaluation of Active Patterns on Direction Instruction for Pedestrians==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3297/short4.pdf
Evaluation of active patterns on direction instruction for
pedestrians
Yu Tamura1 , Hidehiko Shishido2 and Yoshinari Kameda2,*
1
Master’s program in Intelligent and Mechanical Interaction Systems, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennoudai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8573, Japan
2
Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennoudai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8573, Japan
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a direction instruction method using active patterns that is both easy to understand and safe in
augmented reality fashion. An active pattern is a set of moving virtual objects dynamically arranged in a landscape. We
discuss the factors that make active patterns easy to understand and safe. We have developed a preliminary system for
presenting active patterns and included the gaze accumulation counter inside the system so that the gazing time of watching
the active patterns could be counted.
Keywords
Pedestrian navigation, Optical See-Through HMD, Direction instruction, Active pattern
1. Introduction Since the good balance of visibility, comprehensibility,
and safety on the AR-based direction presentation is cru-
Augmented Reality is useful for walking pedestrians on cial, we investigate the performance of the active patterns
streets [1]. Navigation support on walking is a promising by changing the shape, size, height, and transparency of
application of Augmented reality. the virtual objects. We have built a preliminary system
Direction instruction using an HMD may superimpose for evaluation on gaze attraction for checking the safety.
the route to go on the scenery. Because the instruction is We also conduct subjective evaluation by questionnaires.
presented directly in the user’s field of view, the direction
to go should be intuitive and easy to understand. The user
can recognize the direction to go while always looking
forward.
When using augmented reality technology to guide
pedestrians to their destinations, the problem is how to
superimpose the virtual objects that guide them to their
destinations. AR-based direction presentation should ful-
fill the visibility on display. As the comprehensibility, it
should have a good shape and/or motion to indicate the Figure 1: An active pattern of ball shape to instruct the di-
direction to go. In addition to visibility and comprehensi- rection in augmented reality. The balls are flowing down to
bility, it is also important to keep the safety on a walking indicate the way to go.
task. A user should have a clear field of view while walk-
ing. This implies that any inserted virtual objects in AR
fashion should not interfere with safety.
In this paper, we propose a direction instruction 2. Related work
method using active patterns that is both easy to under-
stand and safe in augmented reality fashion. An active As for the challenges of direction display at high level
pattern is a set of moving virtual objects dynamically visibility, four kinds of direction display methods have
arranged in a landscape (Figure 1). been investigated in [2]. Among them, the bird avatar is
thought to be a kind of active pattern. It is designed to
APMAR2022: Asia-Pacific Workshop on Mixed and Augmented Reality make a good balance between safety and comprehensibil-
2022, Dec. 02–03, 2022, Yokohama, Japan ity, but they have not conducted the subjective evaluation
*
Corresponding author. of their approach.
$ tamura.yu@image.iit.tsukuba.ac.jp (Y. Tamura); A 3D shaped arrow in Augmented reality has been
shishido@ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp (H. Shishido);
kameda@ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp (Y. Kameda) investigated for the purpose of direction presentation
0000-0001-8575-0617 (H. Shishido); 0000-0001-6776-1267 on streets[3]. It is good from the viewpoint of visibility
(Y. Kameda) and comprehensibility, but it may have the possibility of
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). decreasing the safety since the size of the object is large
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
and it might hide certain size of the field of view of the
user.
Performance of AR-based direction display methods
on off-road situation has been studied [4] but they do not
conduct safety evaluation.
Safety is a critical issue to design the navigation and
Figure 4: Ball-shape active pattern at the size of 5 cm with
to analyze the performance on direction presentation in 0% transparency, 10 cm with 50%, and 10 cm with 75%.
AR fashion. It is demanded to focus the safety evaluation
on developing new AR-based navigation approaches [5].
corridor where the planned path is set to turn right at 15
3. Active pattern for direction meters away (Figure 5).
display
Our active pattern to present direction on an HMD is
composed by a set of virtual objects that are moving
along the way to go. We adopt an optical see-through
glass as to build the preliminary system for evaluation
(Figure 1).
Since the purpose of presenting the direction is to
let users understand the direction to go, active pattern Figure 5: Map of the experiment environment.
should be visually simple and small not to interfere with
the the field of view of the user. We have prepared three All the subjects are familiar with the corridor and with
simple shapes as candidates for the virtual objects (Fig- AR experiences in their twenties.
ure 2). On a see-through HMD, the objects are arranged
to follow the planned path. Three snapshots of a user’s
view with the different virtual object shape at ground 4.1. Shape and height
level are shown in Figure 3. We prepared eight subjects for shape and height evalua-
Some variation of ball-shape active pattern is shown tion of the virtual objects. Each subject had a calibration
in Figure 4. Transparency is controlled so that users can process and practice time before the experiment. The
see the the regions behind the virtual objects. order of the variations is changed for subjects so as to
eliminate the order effect in total.
There five kinds of trials on this experiment. The first
one (static/ground) is the ball shape virtual object with
static placement. The objects are at the ground level. For
the second to the fourth, the virtual objects of moving
along the planned path is rendered at the ground level
with the shape of ball, cube and ellipsoid respectively.
Figure 2: 3D shapes of virtual objects. The last fifth is same as the third except for the height
at knee level. The size of the virtual objects are set to 10
cm and transparency level is 0% for all the five trials.
The subjects mark scores with a seven-level Likert
scale for four questions after each experience of trials.
The average and the standard deviation are shown in
Figure 6 - 9. A larger score indicates the affirmative
evaluation.
Figure 3: Active patterns with different shape of the virtual Q1 (Figure 6) corresponds to the visibility and Q2
objects. (Figure 7) corresponds to the comprehensibility. The
scores are high with small standard deviation regardless
of shape and height if only they are moving. Q3 (Figure 8)
and Q4 (Figure 9) corresponds to the safety evaluation.
4. Evaluation We think if the score of Q3 is high, it means it looks nat-
ural, so it may indicate that the score of Q4 becomes low
We have developed a preliminary AR system on a Magic because they do not need to watch the virtual objects for
Leap 1 (Figure 1). The experiment was conducted in a a long time. This also implies the safety could be in good
level. As the Q4 score are rather high around 5.0, we
have conducted further investigation with gaze analysis
in the next experiment.
Figure 9: Exp1-Q4: Did you ever keep an eye on the active
pattern while walking?
Figure 6: Exp1-Q1: Did you see the active pattern clearly? position of the user, and it is not moved against the head
rotation. It is because the virtual objects are attached to
the world and the bin matrix should be relatively fixed
against the virtual object coordinate.
Figure 7: Exp1-Q2a: How did you know which way to turn?
Figure 10: Gaze accumulation counter.
We prepared nine subjects for size and transparency
evaluation of the virtual objects. The basic procedure is
same as the first experiment.
There five kinds of trials on this experiment. For the
all five trials, the shape is ball and the objects are placed
at ground level and move to follow the planned path. The
first three trials changes the size at 20cm, 10cm, and 5cm
respectively. As for the fourth and the fifth trials, the
transparency level is changed to 50% and 75%.
The subject evaluations are conducted by setting the
Figure 8: Exp1-Q3: Did you get the impression that the four questions after each experience of trials. The average
active pattern was blending into the real world? and the standard deviation are shown in Figure 11 - 14.
A larger score indicates the affirmative evaluation.
From the results, Q1 (visibility) and Q2 (comprehen-
sibility) becomes lower when the transparency level is
4.2. Size and transparency up. We expected the trials with higher transparency may
On the second experiment, we have developed a gaze get higher score in Q3 and lower in Q4, but actually the
accumulation counter on our preliminary system. We subjects did not respond as we expected.
have utilized the gaze tracking function of Magic Leap Note that we have not shown the results of T-test inten-
1 and set nine by nine bins to cover the field of view of tionally as the numbers of the subjects are less than ten
the user (Figure 10). The bin matrix is fixed to the head and we think the application of T-test is not appropriate
Figure 11: Exp2-Q1: Did you see the active pattern clearly? Figure 14: Exp2-Q4: Did you ever keep an eye on the active
pattern while walking?
on the second experiment, the lower half of the bin matrix
corresponds to the area of presenting the virtual objects.
Even with the high scores of Q4 (Figure 14), we can say
that actually the subjects spent little time on checking the
virtual objects. This means the current implementation
satisfies the safety property to some extent.
Figure 12: Exp2-Q2b: Do you think this active pattern is
suitable as a method to indicate the direction to turn?
Figure 15: Gaze count results of 0.20m, 0.10m, and 0.05m
size.
Figure 16: Gaze count results of 0%, 50%, and 75%.
Figure 13: Exp2-Q3: Did you get the impression that the
active pattern was blending into the real world?
5. Conclusion
for Figure 6 - 9 and Figure 11 - 14.
The results of the gaze accumulation counter during In this paper, we proposed a direction instruction method
the second experiment are shown in Figure 15 and Fig- using active patterns that is both easy to understand
ure 16. Figure 15 corresponds to the first three trials of the and safe in augmented reality fashion with a optical see-
second experiment. Figure 16 corresponds to the second, through HMD. We have developed a preliminary system
the fourth, and the fifth trials of the second experiment. for presenting active patterns and included the gaze ac-
The darkest green color bin indicates the 0.0 time unit of cumulation counter inside the system so that the gazing
gaze accumulation and the brightest color bin indicates time of watching the active patterns could be counted.
the maximum amount of time unit through the second We have conducted subjective evaluation experiments
experiment in the average of all the nine subjects’ trials. and discussed the factors that make active patterns easy
time length per time unit is determined to normalize the to understand and safe.
length difference between the five trials.
Since the virtual objects are placed on the ground level
Acknowledgments
A part of this work is supported by KAKENHI 21H03476.
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