All situational impairments are not created equal: A classification system for situational impairment events and the unique nature of severely constraining situational impairments

This study explores situationally induced impairments and disabilities (SIIDs) from a unique perspective. A two-week diary study of mobile technology users was conducted to create a corpus of situational impairment events (SIEs) that mobile device users may experience in the wild. As a result, themes and classifications describing the type of SIEs that were encountered (such as ambient environmental and social/cultural issues) were identified. In addition, within the created classification system, the authors identified the presence of a subset of SIEs that where severely constraining in the sense that a workaround is not available or easily obtained, or where a technological solution was found that only led to the introduction of a new SIE. The use of the classification of SIEs as well as the identification of the unique nature of those that are severely constraining can help influence the future design of mobile technologies

Walk The Line: Leveraging Lateral Shifts of the Walking Path as an Input Modality for Head-Mounted Displays

Recent technological advances have made head-mounted displays (HMDs) smaller and untethered, fostering the vision of ubiquitous interaction in a digitally augmented physical world. Consequently, a major part of the interaction with such devices will happen on the go, calling for interaction techniques that allow users to interact while walking. In this paper, we explore lateral shifts of the walking path as a hands-free input modality. The available input options are visualized as lanes on the ground parallel to the user's walking path. Users can select options by shifting the walking path sideways to the respective lane. We contribute the results of a controlled experiment with 18 participants, confirming the viability of our approach for fast, accurate, and joyful interactions. Further, based on the findings of the controlled experiment, we present three example applications