SafeXR: alerting walking persons to obstacles in mobile XR environments

The increasing performance of smartphones has made it possible for people to enjoy various mobile XR applications as they walk. Due to the limit of human capability of multitasking, however, it may compromise mobile users’ safety. In this paper, we propose a safety assistance system for walking smartphone users, which utilizes only the smartphone’s built-in sensors. Our solution detects obstacles by analyzing the feature points extracted from the input camera images and then alerts the users to the danger ahead. In typical smartphone game, AR game, and mobile VR game environments, we made two experiments. The first experiment identifies the desirable and preferred distances to alert the obstacles, and the second one identifies what kinds of interfaces are appropriate for alerting walking persons while least distracting them from gaming. The results obtained from the experiments are integrated into a system, which we name SafeXR. Then, solid empirical evaluations are made on the effects of SafeXR on user’s safety, task performances, and user experiences.