Abstract:

Augmented Reality in vehicles through Head-Up or Windscreen Displays offer numerous opportunities to develop road safety or user experience applications or both. These opportunities are further expanded in the context of automated driving, where human drivers are partially freed of the safety-critical driving task to attend to other activities, so-called non-driving related tasks. This brings new human factor challenges, such as lack of situation awareness when the driver is asked to take control of the driving vehicle. There are methodological challenges when undertaking user experience design or human factors research in this domain because of the current development status of future technologies. Prototypes of windscreen displays and automated vehicles are difficult to access and expensive. Therefore, we have developed an affordable virtual reality automated driving simulator that implements real-world driving videos for interface prototyping and testing. In this chapter, we discuss two concepts (dynamic windshield tinting to communicate certainty and an Augmented Reality video screen movements to communicate intention) to extend the windshield with additional driving relevant information, which were rapidly prototyped and evaluated in our Virtual Reality simulator. Following the user experience design approach, we report on qualitative findings from a user study design iteration (N = 16) about those concepts. We reflect on the identified strengths and weaknesses of our design concepts, which were critically influenced by participants’ experience and trust in vehicle automation, as well as the methodological process. Lastly, we report on valuable lessons learnt from developing, improving and implementing our prototyping, simulation and evaluation tool for Augmented Reality applications in automated driving.

Gerber, Michael & Faramarzian Borojeni, Mohammad Hassan & Schroeter, Ronald. (2022). Inception of Perception—Augmented Reality in Virtual Reality: Prototyping Human–Machine Interfaces for Automated Driving. 10.1007/978-3-030-77726-5_18.