Compass visualizations for human-robotic interaction

  • Authors:
  • Curtis M. Humphrey;Julie A. Adams

  • Affiliations:
  • Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Compasses have been used for centuries to express directions and are commonplace in many user interfaces; however, there has not been work in human-robotic interaction (HRI) to ascertain how different compass visualizations affect the interaction. This paper presents a HRI evaluation comparing two representative compass visualizations: top-down and in-world world-aligned. The compass visualizations were evaluated to ascertain which one provides better metric judgment accuracy, lowers workload, provides better situational awareness, is perceived as easier to use, and is preferred. Twenty-four participants completed a within-subject repeated measures experiment. The results agreed with the existing principles relating to 2D and 3D views, or projections of a three-dimensional scene, in that a top-down (2D view) compass visualization is easier to use for metric judgment tasks and a world-aligned (3D view) compass visualization yields faster performance for general navigation tasks. The implication for HRI is that the choice in compass visualization has a definite and non-trivial impact on operator performance (world-aligned was faster), situational awareness (top-down was better), and perceived ease of use (top-down was easier).