For over a decade researchers at the University of New Hampshire have been involved in the exploration and deployment of in-vehicle user interfaces. This talk will provide a short review of our efforts on deploying in-vehicle user interfaces for police through our Project54 effort. Next, the talk will discuss a number of recent driving simulator-based studies in which eye tracking data was used to estimate the visual attention of the driver to the external world, the ability of the driver to control the vehicle, and the level of the driver’s cognitive load.

Andrew L. Kun is associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, and Faculty Fellow at the Volpe Center. His research is focused on driving simulator-based exploration of in-car user interfaces, and estimation methods of the drivers’ cognitive load to determine the effect of the user interface on the driving performance. In this area he is primarily interested in speech interaction, as well as the use of visual behavior and pupil diameter measures to assess and improve the design of user interfaces. In addition to transportation-related work, Kun is also involved in the experimental modeling of collaborative user activities around large-scale multi-touch displays, with a focus on the use of visual behaviors of multiple participants in parallel in building these models.