Gowdham Prabhakar

Sukanth K, Sudhiksha Kandavel Rajan, Rajashekhar V S et al.

While current personal smart devices excel in digital domains, they fall short in assisting users during human environment interaction. This paper proposes Heads Up eXperience (HUX), an AI system designed to bridge this gap, serving as a constant companion across the extended reality (XR) environments. By tracking the user's eye gaze, analyzing the surrounding environment, and interpreting verbal contexts, the system captures and enhances multi-modal data, providing holistic context interpretation and memory storage in real-time task specific situations. This comprehensive approach enables more natural, empathetic and intelligent interactions between the user and HUX AI, paving the path for human computer environment interaction. Intended for deployment in smart glasses and extended reality headsets, HUX AI aims to become a personal and useful AI companion for daily life. By integrating digital assistance with enhanced physical world interactions, this technology has the potential to revolutionize human-AI collaboration in both personal and professional spheres paving the way for the future of personal smart devices.

Gowdham Prabhakar, Priyam Rajkhowa, Pradipta Biswas

In automotive domain, operation of secondary tasks like accessing infotainment system, adjusting air conditioning vents, and side mirrors distract drivers from driving. Though existing modalities like gesture and speech recognition systems facilitate undertaking secondary tasks by reducing duration of eyes off the road, those often require remembering a set of gestures or screen sequences. In this paper, we have proposed two different modalities for drivers to virtually touch the dashboard display using a laser tracker with a mechanical switch and an eye gaze switch. We compared performances of our proposed modalities against conventional touch modality in automotive environment by comparing pointing and selection times of representative secondary task and also analysed effect on driving performance in terms of deviation from lane, average speed, variation in perceived workload and system usability. We did not find significant difference in driving and pointing performance between laser tracking system and existing touchscreen system. Our result also showed that the driving and pointing performance of the virtual touch system with eye gaze switch was significantly better than the same with mechanical switch. We evaluated the efficacy of the proposed virtual touch system with eye gaze switch inside a real car and investigated acceptance of the system by professional drivers using qualitative research. The quantitative and qualitative studies indicated importance of using multimodal system inside car and highlighted several criteria for acceptance of new automotive user interface.

Gowdham Prabhakar, Pradipta Biswas

Automotive User Interface (AutoUI) is relatively a new discipline in the context of both Transportation Engineering and Human Machine Interaction (HMI). It covers various HMI aspects both inside and outside vehicle ranging from operating the vehicle itself, undertaking various secondary tasks, driver behaviour analysis, cognitive load estimation and so on. This review paper discusses various interactive HMI inside a vehicle used for undertaking secondary tasks. We divided recent HMIs through four sections on virtual touch interfaces, wearable devices, speech recognition and non-visual interfaces and eye gaze controlled systems. Finally, we summarized advantages and disadvantages of various technologies.