• Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.5
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• pp.589-595
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• 2011

Objective: This study compares two visual occlusion methods for the evaluation of in-vehicle interfaces. Background: Visual occlusion is a visual demand measuring technique which uses periodic vision/occlusion cycle to simulate a driving(or mobile) environment. It has been widely used for the evaluation of in-vehicle interfaces. There are two major implementation methods for this technique: (1) occlusion using PLATO(portable liquid crystal apparatus for tachistoscopic occlusion) goggles; (2) occlusion using a software application on a touchscreen device. Method: An experiment was conducted to examine the visual demand of an in-vehicle interface prototype using the goggle-based and the touchscreen-based occlusion methods. Address input and radio tuning tasks were evaluated in the experiment. Results: The results showed that, for the radio tuning task, there were no significant differences in total shutter open time and resumability ratio between the two occlusionconditions. However, it took longer for the participants to input addresses with the touchscreen-based occlusion. Conclusion & Application: The results suggest that touchscreen-based method could be used as an alternative to traditional, gogglebased visual occlusion especially in less demanding visual tasks such as radio tuning.