Eyal Ginosar
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel
Drones are increasingly used in situations where they can assist a person. However, people are not familiar with drones approaching them. We propose an expressive light system embedded on a drone to convey its intention to initiate communication, which we present as a four-stage process: Drone-Initiated Engagement Model (DIEM). We then describe the design and development of an LED-based prototype divided in two confgurations with a total of 26 light ani-mations, and report their evaluation in an online survey (N = 156). We describe the suitability of diferent confgurations, animations, and colors to convey each stage of DIEM. We fnally validate our system in a user study (N = 45) that showed that participants can perceive all four stages of approach via the drone movement and that expressive lights provide a more nuanced user experience. We contribute insights into the design of expressive light systems, as a stepping stone towards machine-initiated communication.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581062
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)