On Saturday, April 14, the UNH ECE department hosted an open house for prospective students and their families. The Project54 lab was part of the open house. Our work revolves around advancing mobile computing in law enforcement. As part of this work we conduct research on mobile user interfaces, primarily speech user interfaces in vehicles (e.g. police cruisers). One of our research tools is the Project54 driving simulator (made by DriveSafety, a Utah-based company), which we demonstrated at the open house.

Project54 driving simulator

Many of us have used speech recognition in real-life situations, for example when using a telephone call center. Speech recognition is finding its way into cars as well (e.g. see my blog entry on the Geneva Auto Show) and has been a part of the in-car Project54 system for several years now. The simulator allows us to explore how a speech user interface will influence driving performance under different conditions. The different condtions in question? A very important one is the difficulty of the driving task. For example, are you driving on an open highway in Kansas, or are you negotiating the busy streets of downtown Boston during rush hour? If it’s the latter, having a conversation with your computer may be too distracting to be safe. Of course you can talk to a passenger while driving in Boston and you will not be too distracted to drive, so you can probably do so with a computer too, as long it’s programmed in a smart way. That’s the smarts that our simulator experiments are meant to get us closer to.

Andrew Kun

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