Mobile eye tracking applied as a tool for customer experience research in a crowded train station

Train stations have increasingly become crowded, necessitating stringent requirements in the design of stations and commuter navigation through these stations. In this study, we explored the use of mobile eye tracking in combination with observation and a survey to gain knowledge on customer experience in a crowded train station. We investigated the utilization of mobile eye tracking in ascertaining customers’ perception of the train station environment and analyzed the effect of a signalization prototype (visual pedestrian flow cues), which was intended for regulating pedestrian flow in a crowded underground passage. Gaze behavior, estimated crowd density, and comfort levels (an individual’s comfort level in a certain situation), were measured before and after the implementation of the prototype. The results revealed that the prototype was visible in conditions of low crowd density. However, in conditions of high crowd density, the prototype was less visible, and the path choice was influenced by other commuters. Hence, herd behavior appeared to have a stronger effect than the implemented signalization prototype in conditions of high crowd density. Thus, mobile eye tracking in combination with observation and the survey successfully aided in understanding customers’ perception of the train station environment on a qualitative level and supported the evaluation of the signalization prototype the crowded underground passage. However, the analysis process was laborious, which could be an obstacle for its practical use in gaining customer insights

Analysing passengers' behaviours when boarding trains to improve rail infrastructure and technology

Concentrated boarding describes the phenomenon when rail passengers congregate in certain areas of the platform and board the train carriages that stop near these areas. This influences the distribution of passengers throughout the carriages, which can negatively affect passenger comfort, safety at the platform-train interface, efficiency of the rail network, and the reputation of rail travel as a whole. This project aimed to determine whether concentrated boarding occurs in stations in the UK in order to understand its relevance for future rolling stock, infrastructure design and its associated manufacturing research. Video recording technology was used to observe the movements of passengers in Oxford Station and data was collected for nine individual trains. By reviewing the recordings, the number of passengers boarding through each door of the trains was determined, and the boarding distribution along the length of the platform was plotted. Several reasons for noted trends are offered, and potential solutions proposed. The use of real time information could be invaluable to minimise concentrated boarding, as it would allow passengers to make informed decisions as to where they could board trains to have a better journey experience. These findings indicate the relevance of a human-centred design process, particularly the user research stages, in the process of defining priorities for manufacturing and engineering

Exploring the effectiveness of wall and floor mounted guiding light systems in an underground parking evacuation scenario

Abstract. The usage of virtual reality (VR) in all kinds of applications has been on the rise for several years now. The technology and its applications have matured to a state where it is possible to create realistic and immersive simulations to easily and affordably train people for certain activities that could otherwise be dangerous or costly to implement. These activities include dealing with hazardous materials, evacuating structures or performing surgeries to name a few. The focus of this thesis is on evaluating two types of differently placed guiding light systems using a VR simulation. The effectiveness of these light systems is examined using an evacuation scenario occurring in an underground parking garage during an emergency. The collected data consisted of heart rate measurements and various performance metrics such as completion time, walk distance, and average speed that were recorded during the simulation, and a questionnaire that was conducted before and after the simulation. The participants were divided into three groups consisting of a baseline group with no assistive lighting and two experiment groups with different types of assistive lights. The simulation was run using a VR HMD (head mounted display) in a glass-walled cubicle. All the performance results and measurements are discussed and conclusions are made about the lighting system performances, user experiences and the heart rate measurements. The performance results as well as the heart rate measurements showed differences between the three groups. Furthermore, when comparing the participants by their gaming experience, the results showed significantly better performance for those with more gaming experience. Finally, the experiment as a whole is analysed and improvement suggestion are made to it as well as for possible further research into the topic.Tutkielma seinä- ja lattia-asennettujen avustusvalojen vaikutuksesta maanalaisen parkkihallin evakuointiskenaariossa. Tiivistelmä. Virtuaalitodellisuuden (VR) käyttö kaikenlaisissa sovelluksissa on ollut kasvussa viime vuosien aikana. Itse tekniikka ja sitä käyttävät sovellukset ovat kehittyneet siihen pisteeseen, että niiden avulla on mahdollista luoda realistisia ja immersiivisiä simulaatioita, joilla voidaan helposti ja edullisesti kouluttaa ihmisiä aktiviteetteihin, jotka voisivat muuten olla vaarallisia tai kalliita toteuttaa. Tällaisia aktiviteetteja ovat mm. toimiminen vaarallisten aineiden kanssa, rakennusten evakuointi ja leikkausten tekeminen. Tämän diplomityön fokus on kahden eri tavalla asennettujen avustusvalojen vertailu VR- simulaatiossa. Näiden valaistussysteemien vaikutusta arvioidaan maanalaisessa parkkihallissa tapahtuneen vaaratilanteen jälkeistä evakuointia mallintavan VR-simulaation avulla. Kerätty data koostui sykkeenmittauksesta ja useista suorituskykymittareista kuten suoritusajasta, kävellystä matkasta ja keskinopeudesta, jotka tallennettiin simulaation ajalta, sekä kysymysosioista, joista ensimmäinen täytettiin ennen simulaatiota ja toinen sen jälkeen. Testiin osallistujat jaettiin kolmeen ryhmään, joista kahdella testiryhmällä oli molemmilla apunaan toinen testattavista avustusvalojärjestelmistä ja verrokkiryhmään, jolla ei ollut minkäänlaisia avustusvaloja. Simulaatiossa käytettiin virtuaalitodellisuuslaseja ja ne tehtiin suljetussa lasikopissa. Simulaatiosta suoriutuminen ja mittaustulokset käydään läpi ja niiden perusteella tehdään johtopäätökset valaistusjärjestelmien suorituskyvystä, käyttäjien kokemuksista ja sykkeenmittauksen tuloksista. Sekä suoritusten- että sykkeenmittauksen tuloksissa oli eroja ryhmien välillä. Lisäksi verrattaessa osallistujia näiden pelikokemuksen perusteella, osoittivat tulokset selkeästi parempaa suorituskykyä niillä, joilla oli enemmän kokemusta tietokonepeleistä. Lopuksi tutkimuksen onnistuminen kokonaisuudessaan analysoidaan ja tehdään parannusehdotuksia jo tehtyyn tutkimukseen sekä ehdotuksia mahdolliseen jatkotutkimukseen

Understanding the relationship between signage and mobile map for indoor wayfinding

Wayfinding, a fundamental task in daily life, becomes more complicated and difficult with greater development of a society. People can become lost and frustrated by being disoriented in complex built environments. This study investigates the effect of combining a physical wayfinding system with a digital device on users\u27 wayfinding performance in a building with architectural complexity. Through exploring the combined use of signage and the Google Indoor Map, the study provides information on their interactivity, effectiveness and reliability for use in a wayfinding system that may increase understanding the design of well-functioning wayfinding systems. Twenty participants ranging widely in age were divided into four groups, which performed under different combination of four variables: existing signage, newly-designed prototype signage, and combination of the Google Indoor Map with the two signage systems. The task was to find three given destinations: Bookends Café, Tier 5 and CELT. When video recordings of the participants\u27 wayfinding behavior during the three tasks were reviewed and the post-survey after the task was analyzed, the limitations of using the Google Indoor Map as an interactive wayfinding aid were revealed and the significant role of physical sign system was reinforced. The study discussed these findings and suggested future directions for the combined use of physical signage systems with digital aids to improve the quality of the wayfinding experience for users

Mobility Design

Climate change and the scarcity of resources, but also the steadily increasing amount of traffic, make it indispensable to develop new solutions for environmentally friendly and people-friendly mobility. With the expansion of digital information systems, we will in future be able to easily combine different modes of transport according to our needs. These developments are a great challenge for the design of different mobility spaces. While the focus in Volume 1 was on practice, Volume 2 now brings together research from the fields of design, architecture, urban planning, geography, social science, transport planning, psychology and communication technology. The current discussion about the traffic turnaround is expanded to include the perspective of user-centred mobility design

Subjective experience and visual attention to a historic building: A real-world eye-tracking study

The objective of this exploratory study is to discover the relations between visual attention to an architectural work and the subjective experiences produced during its observation. A subjective experience with a building is the specific manner in which an architectural element or the building as a whole are presented to a person. The qualities of the element as how they are perceived and the inner world of the observer are both considered in this subjective experience. The aims of this study are to describe the experience that a building generates in people, pinpoint what has attracted the participant’s attention during each view of the building in an itinerary; and understand which aspects of this selected case study have made it an object of attention. An eye-tracking study was carried out using a portable eye tracker. This tool allowed the participants to walk freely around the exterior of a historic train station in the city of Monterrey, Mexico. Two groups of participants, with routes starting from opposite sides of the building, contemplated it while using the eye tracker. Eye tracking allowed for the identification of the architectural elements that were objects of attention, the lengths of observation, and the points of view from which the elements were observed. Other data collection techniques, such as the think-aloud protocol and a special type of survey, were used to deeply understand the experiences that accompanied the visual exploration of the historic building. Results suggest that the participants observed the different architectural elements for a time that was neither influenced by the route used to explore the building nor the point where that route was initiated. The architectural elements identified as examples of high-quality architecture and perceived as aesthetically pleasing by the participants during the itinerary were observed for longer time

Taux : a system for evaluating sound feedback in navigational tasks

This thesis presents the design and development of an evaluation system for generating audio displays that provide feedback to persons performing navigation tasks. It first develops the need for such a system by describing existing wayfinding solutions, investigating new electronic location-based methods that have the potential of changing these solutions and examining research conducted on relevant audio information representation techniques. An evaluation system that supports the manipulation of two basic classes of audio display is then described. Based on prior work on wayfinding with audio display, research questions are developed that investigate the viability of different audio displays. These are used to generate hypotheses and develop an experiment which evaluates four variations of audio display for wayfinding. Questions are also formulated that evaluate a baseline condition that utilizes visual feedback. An experiment which tests these hypotheses on sighted users is then described. Results from the experiment suggest that spatial audio combined with spoken hints is the best approach of the approaches comparing spatial audio. The test experiment results also suggest that muting a varying audio signal when a subject is on course did not improve performance. The system and method are then refined. A second experiment is conducted with improved displays and an improved experiment methodology. After adding blindfolds for sighted subjects and increasing the difficulty of navigation tasks by reducing the arrival radius, similar comparisons were observed. Overall, the two experiments demonstrate the viability of the prototyping tool for testing and refining multiple different audio display combinations for navigational tasks. The detailed contributions of this work and future research opportunities conclude this thesis

Navigation, Path Planning, and Task Allocation Framework For Mobile Co-Robotic Service Applications in Indoor Building Environments

Recent advances in computing and robotics offer significant potential for improved autonomy in the operation and utilization of today’s buildings. Examples of such building environment functions that could be improved through automation include: a) building performance monitoring for real-time system control and long-term asset management; and b) assisted indoor navigation for improved accessibility and wayfinding. To enable such autonomy, algorithms related to task allocation, path planning, and navigation are required as fundamental technical capabilities. Existing algorithms in these domains have primarily been developed for outdoor environments. However, key technical challenges that prevent the adoption of such algorithms to indoor environments include: a) the inability of the widely adopted outdoor positioning method (Global Positioning System - GPS) to work indoors; and b) the incompleteness of graph networks formed based on indoor environments due to physical access constraints not encountered outdoors. The objective of this dissertation is to develop general and scalable task allocation, path planning, and navigation algorithms for indoor mobile co-robots that are immune to the aforementioned challenges. The primary contributions of this research are: a) route planning and task allocation algorithms for centrally-located mobile co-robots charged with spatiotemporal tasks in arbitrary built environments; b) path planning algorithms that take preferential and pragmatic constraints (e.g., wheelchair ramps) into consideration to determine optimal accessible paths in building environments; and c) navigation and drift correction algorithms for autonomous mobile robotic data collection in buildings. The developed methods and the resulting computational framework have been validated through several simulated experiments and physical deployments in real building environments. Specifically, a scenario analysis is conducted to compare the performance of existing outdoor methods with the developed approach for indoor multi-robotic task allocation and route planning. A simulated case study is performed along with a pilot experiment in an indoor built environment to test the efficiency of the path planning algorithm and the performance of the assisted navigation interface developed considering people with physical disabilities (i.e., wheelchair users) as building occupants and visitors. Furthermore, a case study is performed to demonstrate the informed retrofit decision-making process with the help of data collected by an intelligent multi-sensor fused robot that is subsequently used in an EnergyPlus simulation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods in a range of applications involving constraints on both the environment (e.g., path obstructions) and robot capabilities (e.g., maximum travel distance on a single charge). By focusing on the technical capabilities required for safe and efficient indoor robot operation, this dissertation contributes to the fundamental science that will make mobile co-robots ubiquitous in building environments in the near future.PHDCivil EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143969/1/baddu_1.pd

Learning cognitive maps: Finding useful structure in an uncertain world

In this chapter we will describe the central mechanisms that influence how people learn about large-scale space. We will focus particularly on how these mechanisms enable people to effectively cope with both the uncertainty inherent in a constantly changing world and also with the high information content of natural environments. The major lessons are that humans get by with a less is more approach to building structure, and that they are able to quickly adapt to environmental changes thanks to a range of general purpose mechanisms. By looking at abstract principles, instead of concrete implementation details, it is shown that the study of human learning can provide valuable lessons for robotics. Finally, these issues are discussed in the context of an implementation on a mobile robot. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

The Aha! Experience of Spatial Reorientation

The experience of spatial re-orientation is investigated as an instance of the wellknown phenomenon of the Aha! moment. The research question is: What are the visuospatial conditions that are most likely to trigger the spatial Aha! experience? The literature suggests that spatial re-orientation relies mainly on the geometry of the environment and a visibility graph analysis is used to quantify the visuospatial information. Theories from environmental psychology point towards two hypotheses. The Aha! experience may be triggered by a change in the amount of visual information, described by the isovist properties of area and revelation, or by a change in the complexity of the visual information associated with the isovist properties of clustering coefficient and visual control. Data from participants’ exploratory behaviour and EEG recordings are collected during wayfinding in virtual reality urban environments. Two types of events are of interest here: (a) sudden changes of the visuospatial information preceding subjects' response to investigate changes in EEG power; and (b) participants brain dynamics (Aha! effect) just before the response to examine differences in isovist values at this location. Research on insights, time-frequency analysis of the P3 component and findings from navigation and orientation studies suggest that the spatial Aha! experience may be reflected by: a parietal alpha power decrease associated with the switch of the representation and a frontocentral theta increase indexing spatial processing during decision-making. Single-trial time-frequency analysis is used to classify trials into two conditions based on the alpha/theta power differences between a 3s time-period before participants’ response and a time-period of equal duration before that. Behavioural results show that participants are more likely to respond at locations with low values of clustering coefficient and high values of visual control. The EEG analysis suggests that the alpha decrease/theta increase condition occurs at locations with significantly lower values of clustering coefficient and higher values of visual control. Small and large decreases in clustering coefficient, just before the response, are associated with significant differences in delta/theta power. The values of area and revelation do not show significant differences. Both behavioural and EEG results suggest that the Aha! experience of re-orientation is more likely to be triggered by a change in the complexity of the visual-spatial environment rather than a change in the amount, as measured by the relevant isovist properties