Effect of Ambient Light on Mobile Interaction

In this work we investigate the effect of ambient light on performance during mobile interaction. We evaluate three conditions of ambient light – normal light, dimmed light, normal light while wearing sunglasses. Our results show that wearing sunglasses and dimmed light negatively affect reaction time, while dimmed light negatively affects accuracy performance in target acquisition tasks. We also show that wearing sunglasses increases memorising time in visual search tasks. Our study contributes to the growing body of research on the effects of different situational impairments on mobile interaction.