Analysis of Findings of Experiment 1 and 2 & Implications

The results and the observations of participants' behaviour in both Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that the fish-flow pattern is not satisfactory. Furthermore, we identified that the identification of public directional information from the visual pattern corresponding to a target is related to several factors, including the size and shape of individual graphical element, the animation of the visual pattern and the projection. We analyse these factors in detail below so as to draw implications for our public directional information re-design.

A. Size and shape of individual graphical element

The shape of the fish is represented by a circle connecting to a short bar, which is not as directional as the shape of an arrow. Moreover, the size of the fish was criticized that

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it was too small. If the size of individual graphical element was increased and the shape was more directional, when CROSSFLOW users are navigating, they could see individual graphical element and the direction indicated by individual graphical element more clearly, furthermore, they may be able to identify a destination indicated by multiple graphical elements and distinguish two destinations nearby more easily.

B. Animation of the visual pattern

In the experiments, the participants have difficulty to distinguish two successive flow directions in the fish-flow pattern and they tend to mistake the public directional information presented in the former or later time slot as the correct public directional information corresponding to their private cue. This might be because they are distracted by the transition animation between two successive flow directions. In the animation, the fish in different projection areas rotate different angles in order to orient themselves to a successive flow direction.

Thus removing the transition animation might be better. Moreover, using fish flow motion to indicate different directions may not be as good as fixing the location of the graphical element to point to them.

C. Projection

Using projection as public display has two limitations. One is that the darker lighting is required in the indoor environment where CROSSFLOW is deployed as the brightness degree of projection is relative low. The other is that the shadows of obstacles and the occupants of the indoor environment caused by the projection can block CROSSFLOW users' view of the projected visual pattern. These limitations might be able to be solved by projecting the visual pattern on the walls and ceilings or using other types of public displays such as floor lights, large plasma screens or LED displays which can be embedded in the indoor environment.

D. Distance information

It was suggested in the participants' feedback in Experiment 2 that the distance information, e.g. how far from the location of a user to his/her destination is, should be shown in the visual pattern. As the common indoor environments are much smaller in

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comparison with large scale outdoor environments, the distance information may be not so important for indoor navigation; furthermore, adding distance information to the visual pattern of the CROSSFLOW system may impose higher attention and cognitive load on CROSSFLOW users.

6.2.2 Implications 2: The most appropriate duration of time slot should be identified. We have indicated in Chapter 5 that the identification of public directional information corresponding to a target of CROSSFLOW users may involve two processes: the process of the integration of temporally congruent but spatially incongruent private cue and visual pattern corresponding to a target, and the process of the identification of public directional information from the visual pattern.

If the duration of time slot (which equals to the presentation time of each visual pattern in CROSSFLOW V1) is too short, users could not complete the two processes during the first presentation of the visual pattern corresponding to their target. Furthermore, they had to wait the next presentation to complete the processes and even wait additional presentation to confirm their identification of the public directional information corresponding to their target, which means that they may need several full cycle time at each decision point in an indoor environment. This would result in poor navigation efficiency. The same result would happen if the duration of time slot is too long and the number of time slots in a cycle (which equals to the number of destination) is certain, as the length of cycle time is calculated by the duration of time slot multiplies the number of time slots in a cycle, the longer duration of time slot is, the longer cycle time will be.

Although only the former case and relevant complaints were found in the findings of previous experiments, the analysis above implies that the appropriate duration of time slot, which is as short as possible (to avoid long cycle time) while long enough for CROSSFLOW users to complete the two processes during the first presentation of the visual pattern corresponding to a target, should be investigated. The investigation was done in a user study (Experiment 3) reported in Chapter 7, in which we compared the effect of different duration of time slot and cycle time on users' task performance.

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6.2.3 Implications 3: Users need more training and the system lag of synchronization should be controlled.

Two of the ten participants in Experiment 2 reported that sometimes they could not integrate vibration from their smartphones and visual pattern corresponding to their target into one exact time slot.

There are two possible causes for this. Firstly, it might be because that the participants were unfamiliar with the integration of temporally congruent but spatially incongruent multimodal stimuli, i.e. the vibrotactile private cue and the synchronized visual pattern. Depending on individual difference in multisensory integration capability, some people may have difficulty to maintain the simultaneity across modalities. The crossmodal simultaneity would be more difficult to be maintained if a user just paid attention to the visual pattern corresponding to his target far away from his/her local position during the smartphone vibrated. If this is the cause, then more guidance and training on using CROSSFLOW would be necessary.

Secondly, although we have tried to make the synchronization of private cue and each visual pattern displayed within the same time slot as precise as possible, when synchronizing the clocks on smartphone with the server, there might still be a system lag between them which was not compensated by the software. If the system lags was larger than the simultaneity threshold for input from visual and vibrotactile sensory modalities, the user might mistake the public directional information shown in the successive time slot for the directional information relating to his/her target. Although the system lag could not be avoided completely, it should not exceed visual-auditory and visual-haptic simultaneity threshold reviewed in Section 3.3.2.

6.2.4 Implication 4: Private cue should be presented earlier than visual pattern corresponding to a target

It was suggested in the findings that a private cue should precede the visual pattern corresponding to a target. A range of psychological evidences have demonstrated that an irrelevant sound can augment the perception of both concurrent and subsequent visual event (McDonald et al. 2000; Vroomen & Gelder 2000; see Driver & Spence 1998 for a review). More specifically, Sheth and Shimojo (2004) indicated that an auditory cue maximally

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enhanced visual salience if the sound preceded the visual target by 50~100 milliseconds. Therefore, to present private cue earlier than the corresponding visual pattern indicating a target may facilitate CROSSFLOW users to capture the visual pattern relevant to them and identify their target via the visual pattern. In an ideal situation, the users may be able to identify their target when the visual pattern relevant to them is shown to them at the first time.

6.2.5 Implication 5: There should be a semantic correlation between private cue and corresponding visual pattern.

In Experiment 1 and 2, private cue and visual pattern corresponding to different targets were only temporally correlated, and they have no semantic link between each other.

According to the implication in Section 3.3.4 that a semantically appropriate coordination of modalities may improve the user experience although where user performance may not directly benefit from the effect of semantic factors, a semantically appropriate coordination between private cue and visual pattern may not increase the efficiency of CROSSFLOW directly, but may be able to enhance the salience of visual pattern corresponding to each target and improve the user experience afforded by CROSSFLOW. For example, if natural everyday sounds were used as private cue which have a semantic link to visual pattern animation that simulates natural phenomenon, they would make more sense for a user than abstract beep sound. This implies that the design space of semantic correlated and aesthetic pleasing visual-audio and visual-tactile information combinations should be explored in the re-design of private cue and public directional information.