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When medical caregivers transfer patients to another person’s care (a patient handoff), it is essential they effectively communicate the patient’s condition to ensure the best possible health outcomes. Emergency situations caused by mass casualty events (e.g., natural disasters) introduce additional difficulties to handoff procedures such as environmental noise. We created a projected mixed reality simulation of a handoff scenario involving a medical evacuation by air and tested how low, medium, and high levels of helicopter noise affected participants’ handoff experience, handoff performance, and behaviors. Through a human-subjects experimental design study (N = 21), we found that the addition of noise increased participants’ subjective stress and task load, decreased their self-assessed and actual performance, and caused participants to speak louder. Participants also stood closer to the virtual human sending the handoff information when listening to the handoff than they stood to the receiver when relaying the handoff information. We discuss implications for the design of handoff training simulations and avenues for future handoff communication research. 

In this paper, we report on initial work exploring the potential value of technology-mediated cues and signals to improve cross-reality interruptions. We investigated the use of color-coded visual cues (LED lights) to help a person decide when to interrupt a virtual reality (VR) user, and a gesture-based mechanism (waving at the user) to signal their desire to do so. To assess the potential value of these mechanisms we conducted a preliminary 2×3 within-subjects experimental design user study (N=10) where the participants acted in the role of the interrupter. While we found that our visual cues improved participants' experiences, our gesture-based signaling mechanism did not, as users did not trust it nor consider it as intuitive as a speech-based mechanism might be. Our preliminary findings motivate further investigation of interruption cues and signaling mechanisms to inform future VR head-worn display system designs. 

Smart devices and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are replacing or being incorporated into traditional devices at a growing pace. The use of digital interfaces to interact with these devices has become a common occurrence in homes, work spaces, and various industries around the world. The most common interfaces for these connected devices focus on mobile apps or voice control via intelligent virtual assistants. However, with augmented reality (AR) becoming more popular and accessible among consumers, there are new opportunities for spatial user interfaces to seamlessly bridge the gap between digital and physical affordances. In this paper, we present a human-subject study evaluating and comparing four user interfaces for smart connected environments: gaze input, hand gestures, voice input, and a mobile app. We assessed participants’ user experience, usability, task load, completion time, and preferences. Our results show multiple trade-offs between these interfaces across these measures. In particular, we found that gaze input shows great potential for future use cases, while both gaze input and hand gestures suffer from limited familiarity among users, compared to voice input and mobile apps.