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SafeXR: alerting walking persons to obstacles in mobile XR environments

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Abstract

The increasing performance of smartphones has made it possible for people to enjoy various mobile XR applications as they walk. Due to the limit of human capability of multitasking, however, it may compromise mobile users’ safety. In this paper, we propose a safety assistance system for walking smartphone users, which utilizes only the smartphone’s built-in sensors. Our solution detects obstacles by analyzing the feature points extracted from the input camera images and then alerts the users to the danger ahead. In typical smartphone game, AR game, and mobile VR game environments, we made two experiments. The first experiment identifies the desirable and preferred distances to alert the obstacles, and the second one identifies what kinds of interfaces are appropriate for alerting walking persons while least distracting them from gaming. The results obtained from the experiments are integrated into a system, which we name SafeXR. Then, solid empirical evaluations are made on the effects of SafeXR on user’s safety, task performances, and user experiences.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Institute of Information and Communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP) Grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2020-0-00861) and National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2017M3C4A7066316).

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  1. Department of Software Convergence, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, South Korea

    HyeongYeop Kang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea

    JungHyun Han

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  1. HyeongYeop Kang
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Kang, H., Han, J. SafeXR: alerting walking persons to obstacles in mobile XR environments. Vis Comput 36, 2065–2077 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-020-01907-4

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