Exploring Vibrotactile and Peripheral Cues for Spatial Attention Guidance

For decision making in monitoring and control rooms situation awareness is key. Given the often spacious and complex environments, simple alarms are not sufficient for attention guidance (e.g., on ship bridges). In our work, we explore shifting attention towards the location of relevant entities in large cyber-physical systems. Therefore, we used pervasive displays: tactile displays on both upper arms and a peripheral display. With these displays, we investigated shifting the attention in a seated and standing scenario. In a first user study, we evaluated four distinct cue patterns for each on-body display. We tested seated monitoring limited to 90° in front of the user. In a second study, we continued with the two patterns from the first study for lowest and highest urgency perceived. Here, we investigated standing monitoring in a 360° environment. We found that tactile cues led to faster arousal times than visual cues, whereas the attention shift speed for visual cues was faster than tactile cues.