Last Friday Oskar Palinko defended his MS thesis. Oszkar’s thesis was centered around the cool push-to-talk (PTT) glove he has designed.

Oszkar ran a rather large user study (24 participants) to evaluate if the PTT glove outperforms a fixed PTT button. While in comparing driving performance when using the two PTT solutions Oszkar didn’t find a main effect, he did find that the experiment participants looked down at the steering wheel more often when using the fixed PTT. Is this a problem? Maybe. While the total amount of time subjects spent looking at the steering wheel when using the fixed PTT button amounted to about 1% of the total experiment time, the average fixation was around 300 ms long. If such a fixation came at the wrong time (e.g. at the moment a leading vehicle started to brake), this could be a problem.

Congratulations Oszkar on a job well done!

Andrew Kun

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