Using a VR Field Study to Assess the Eects of Visual and Haptic Cues in "In-the-Wild" Locomotion Ana de Oliveira ana.lipa.oliveira@tecnico.ulisboa.pt Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal Mohamed Khamis mohamed.khamis@glasgow.ac.uk School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Augusto Esteves augusto.esteves@tecnico.ulisboa.pt ITI / LARSyS, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal Figure 1: Two screenshots from our VR scene. On the left we have highlighted the several distractors put in place to assess participants awareness of them across the cue conditions: (a) a passing car; (b) a pedestrian; and (c) a crossing light. On the right we present a closer look to stimulus in the visual cue condition. ABSTRACT This work aims to assess the eect of visual and haptic cues in users with gait impairments; not only in performance, but also in terms of usability, perceived cognitive load, and safety. These haptic cues were delivered via wrist-worn devices, with the goal of supporting these users while out in-the-wild – three types of haptic cues were tested. To further assess the impact of haptic and visual cues outside of a laboratory environment, we used a Virtual Reality Field Study to safely assess the impact of these cues in users’ awareness of their surroundings (measured via gaze hits and dwell). Despite conducting a preliminary study with participants not suering from gait impairments (N=6), our results seem to indicate a positive eect of the haptic cues in regards to participant cadence, step length, and general awareness of their surroundings when compared to the visual cue. One of the simpler haptic cues was also the preferred stimulus by all participants. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing  Health informatics; • Human-centered computing  Empirical studies in accessibility; Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permied under Creative Commons License Aribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Cross-Reality (XR) Interaction, ACM ISS 2020, November 8 2020, Lisbon, Portugal KEYWORDS Parkinson’s Disease, Gait, Visual cues, Haptic Cues, Virtual-reality, Virtual Field Study, Usability, Attention, Eye-tracking Reference Format: Ana de Oliveira, Mohamed Khamis, and Augusto Esteves. 2020. Using a VR Field Study to Assess the Ef ects of Visual and Haptic Cues in "In-the-Wild" Locomotion. In Cross-Reality (XR) Interaction, ACM ISS 2020 (International Workshop on XR Interaction 2020). 1 CROSS-REALITY INTERACTION We agree with Speicher et al.’s expectation that the distinctions between AR and VR will fade away in time [24]. In that sense, we see Cross-Reality Interaction not so much as a system-centred series of in-app transitions across the Reality-Virtuality continuum [12], but as user- or experience-centred transitions. That is, how can we build mixed-reality systems that enable users to seamlessly transition their attention between digital content and the physical world? How can they transition from ready-at-hand and present- at-hand operations when interacting with mixed-reality tools [ 4]? How can users ooad cognitive processes to a blend of digital and physical spaces? In that regard, the work we present in this paper focuses on a small subset of those transitions: how can we model and study real world behavior via a VR experience? How can we transition abstractions, data, observations, and ultimately knowledge across these realities? We use this premise to study the eect of various cues in users’ gait, relying on VR to safely simulate a variety of competing stimulus that can aect users’ performance with these during in-the-wild locomotion.