WoZ Way

WoZ Way

Interaction designers often have difficulty understanding people’s real-world experiences with ubiquitous systems. The automobile is a great example of these challenges, where on-road testing is time-consuming and provides little ability for rapid prototyping of interface behavior. In this demonstration, we show WoZ Way, a system to connect remote designers and researchers. This code provides the computing systems to give people the opportunity to “ride along” with a driver on the road while observing the drive, interacting through a machine speech system, viewing live car data, and controlling an in-car interface prototype.

System Description

1. A Wizard interface with live video, audio, and data displays from the remote vehicle and controls to send text-to-speech messages to the driver or control the behavior of in-car prototypes
2. A mediating data server to manage communication between the remote vehicle and the Wizard interface; the data server also collects time-stamped data logs
3. A computer in the car to collect and share video, audio, and automotive data over the internet with the Wizard interface and to control spoken text-to-speech messages, screen interfaces, and electromechanical components
4. Auxiliary interfaces including screens, sensors, and actuators used in each specific study

Suggested Citation

If you use any part of this code for your own research, please cite:

Nikolas Martelaro and Wendy Ju. 2017. WoZ Way: Enabling Real-time Remote Interaction Prototyping & Observation in On-road Vehicles. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW ‘17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 169-182. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998293

Authors and Contributors

This project was developed by @nikmart for his thesis work at Stanford’s Center for Design Research.

Support or Contact

Have any questions about this project or issues with the code? Email Nik at nikmart (at) stanford (dot) edu