Augmenting skiers' peripheral perception

Abstract

The growing popularity of winter sports, as well as the trend towards high speed carving skis, have increased the risk of accidents on today's ski slopes. While many skiers now wear ski helmets, their bulk might in turn lower skiers' ability to sense their surroundings, potentially leading to dangerous situations. In this paper, we describe our "Smart" Ski Helmet (S-SH) prototype. S-SH uses a set of laser range finders mounted on the back to detect skiers approaching from behind and warns the wearer about potential collisions using three LEDs mounted at the helmet's front edge, slightly above the wearer's eye level. In this work, we describe a controlled experiment with 20 ski and snowboarding enthusiasts and a follow-up on-slope deployment with 6 additional participants of varying levels of expertise. Our findings indicate that the S-SH can significantly increase skiers' peripheral perception on traverse trails.