Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

Unmuting Smart Phones in Cars:
getting phones to speak to us in ways their owners can’t
Alex Zafiroglu and Jennifer Healey
Interaction and Experience Research Laboratory, Intel Corporation
2111 N. E. 25 th Avenue, Hillsboro, OR 97124-5961 USA
{alexandra.c.zafiroglu, jennifer.healey}@intel.com
ABSTRACT
In this position paper, we argue that as a first step in directing
experience development for features and services that will span
both built-in IVI systems and internet-connected devices that
drivers and passengers regularly move in and out of their cars, we
need to understand how people conceptualize time, routines, and
activities enabled by automobility. We need to understand how
these experiences are being challenged and remade by smart
phone use in cars. We describe our ongoing efforts in the Local
Experience of Automobility (LEAM) Project to delineate how,
when, where and why people interact with their smart phones
during and around car journeys, through a combination of
methods to track and probe on smart phone use in cars among
drivers who regularly use their smart phones while driving.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human Factors, Human
Information Processing
General Terms
Automobility, ethnographic research, sensors, GPS,
Keywords
Ethnography, GPS, Smartphone use tracking, IVI , automobility
1. INTRODUCTION
The future of in-vehicle digital experiences will be a mix of builtin
and brought in technologies such as navigation systems,
entertainment systems, radar detectors, smart phones and tablets.
This technology heterogeneous future is consistent with the
heterogeneous present, and is predicated on incommensurate
consumer-driven refresh cycles for automobiles (ideally 3 years in
Singapore, for example, and more along the lines of 7 years in the
US) and smart phones (as frequently as every 6 months in some
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markets) that is acutely felt by both OEMs and by car owners and
users, and unlikely to fundamentally change in the foreseeable
future.
The technology heterogeneous present encompasses a continuum
of methods for bringing content and services into the car, models
for interfacing and interacting with them, and sources of compute
power that drive these experiences. In cars without the latest and
most advanced IVI systems, we see a patchwork of methods for
integrating peripheral devices to existing car infrastructures, from
electrical power to audio systems to visual displays. At one end
the continuum are IVI systems that only allow content to be
brought in via SD cards or USB keys, relegating all the
intelligence and interaction to the in-car system. On the other
extreme are systems that allow wired or wireless syncing and
interaction with content and services from the brought-in device
through a variety of modalities such as: touching an IVI screen,
pressing buttons, twisting knobs or speaking to a voice-driven
system.
In this continuum, what we find most interesting are the tensions
inherent in what we think of as the messy and contentious
midpoint - an experience area we define as encompassing both
solutions for connecting smart phones to the infrastructure of the
car that keep the interaction and „smarts‟ on the phone itself, as
well as continued use of smart phones not connected or synced to
the car at all, even when such solutions exist or could relatively
easily be added to the vehicle. These practices belie many car
users‟ great ambivalence about how new communications,
information and entertainment options are integrated into cars.
As mentioned in our poster on the Car Turn Outs project [1],
Reggie, a design director in London who regularly uses his
Smartphone to listen to music while driving, epitomizes this
ambivalence. While he recognized that “my car takes me back 10
years”, he was unwilling to do away with his CD player in favor
of an IVI system or even a stereo with USB or memory card slot
because it wasn‟t worth investing in a technology that he couldn‟t
take with him outside his car. His preferred solution was to listen
to his music on his iPhone, with the sound turned to high volume.
We want to better understand users‟ ambivalence to investing in
integrating smart phones with in-car systems in order to scope
future safety, communication, entertainment and other digital
experiences for smart transportation. We start with two
assumptions: first, that intelligence and services will be
distributed across platforms (“built in” and “brought in)”, and
second, that such experiences should be responsive and
customized to various automobility experiences around the world.