September 8, 2007
Study: Walking and Talking in Step (yawn)
Of all the studies on cell phones, this one seems the most, well, uninteresting. New Scientist reports on the walking and talking in step study, which can "enrich the (mobile) users experience"
"When was the last time you walked down the street talking on your cellphone to another person doing the same somewhere else? You may have been walking in step, for around 30 per cent of the time, according to preliminary research.
The authors of the paper were actually trying to make this synchronisation possible over the phone to see if it enriched the users' experience. They devised a way to transmit the jolting of a caller's footsteps so that the other person felt them through their phone's vibrate function.
But in tests, 10 pairs of people trying the system were, on average, most synchronised when they were having an interactive conversation, and couldn't feel the other's steps. For 29 per cent of the time, their steps were in time, according to the researchers' definition.
Feeling the pounding of the other person's feet via the cellphones did improve how synchronised a pair's steps were when they were having a scripted conversation, or describing images down the line, though.
... The study was carried out by computer scientists Roderick Murray-Smith from the University of Glasgow and Bojan Musizza from the Institut Jozef Stefan in Slovenia; along with psychologists Simon Garrod and Melissa Jackson, both also at Glasgow, and Andrew Ramsay from the Hamilton Institute, Ireland."
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